Arquivo da categoria: Uncategorized

The Tar Sands Disaster (N.Y.Times)

02/04/2013UncategorizedCanadá, Economia, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Políticas públicas, Previsão, Tar sandsrenzotaddei

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

By THOMAS HOMER-DIXON

Published: March 31, 2013

WATERLOO, Ontario

Rick Froberg

IF President Obama blocks the Keystone XL pipeline once and for all, he’ll do Canada a favor.

Canada’s tar sands formations, landlocked in northern Alberta, are a giant reserve of carbon-saturated energy — a mixture of sand, clay and a viscous low-grade petroleum called bitumen. Pipelines are the best way to get this resource to market, but existing pipelines to the United States are almost full. So tar sands companies, and the Alberta and Canadian governments, are desperately searching for export routes via new pipelines.

Canadians don’t universally support construction of the pipeline. A poll by Nanos Research in February 2012 found that nearly 42 percent of Canadians were opposed. Many of us, in fact, want to see the tar sands industry wound down and eventually stopped, even though it pumps tens of billions of dollars annually into our economy.

The most obvious reason is that tar sands production is one of the world’s most environmentally damaging activities. It wrecks vast areas of boreal forest through surface mining and subsurface production. It sucks up huge quantities of water from local rivers, turns it into toxic waste and dumps the contaminated water into tailing ponds that now cover nearly 70 square miles.

Also, bitumen is junk energy. A joule, or unit of energy, invested in extracting and processing bitumen returns only four to six joules in the form of crude oil. In contrast, conventional oil production in North America returns about 15 joules. Because almost all of the input energy in tar sands production comes from fossil fuels, the process generates significantly more carbon dioxide than conventional oil production.

There is a less obvious but no less important reason many Canadians want the industry stopped: it is relentlessly twisting our society into something we don’t like. Canada is beginning to exhibit the economic and political characteristics of a petro-state.

Countries with huge reserves of valuable natural resources often suffer from economic imbalances and boom-bust cycles. They also tend to have low-innovation economies, because lucrative resource extraction makes them fat and happy, at least when resource prices are high.

Canada is true to type. When demand for tar sands energy was strong in recent years, investment in Alberta surged. But that demand also lifted the Canadian dollar, which hurt export-oriented manufacturing in Ontario, Canada’s industrial heartland. Then, as the export price of Canadian heavy crude softened in late 2012 and early 2013, the country’s economy stalled.

Canada’s record on technical innovation, except in resource extraction, is notoriously poor. Capital and talent flow to the tar sands, while investments in manufacturing productivity and high technology elsewhere languish.

But more alarming is the way the tar sands industry is undermining Canadian democracy. By suggesting that anyone who questions the industry is unpatriotic, tar sands interest groups have made the industry the third rail of Canadian politics.

The current Conservative government holds a large majority of seats in Parliament but was elected in 2011 with only 40 percent of the vote, because three other parties split the center and left vote. The Conservative base is Alberta, the province from which Prime Minister Stephen Harper and many of his allies hail. As a result, Alberta has extraordinary clout in federal politics, and tar sands influence reaches deep into the federal cabinet.

Both the cabinet and the Conservative parliamentary caucus are heavily populated by politicians who deny mainstream climate science. The Conservatives have slashed financing for climate science, closed facilities that do research on climate change, told federal government climate scientists not to speak publicly about their work without approval and tried, unsuccessfully, to portray the tar sands industry as environmentally benign.

The federal minister of natural resources, Joe Oliver, has attacked “environmental and other radical groups” working to stop tar sands exports. He has focused particular ire on groups getting money from outside Canada, implying that they’re acting as a fifth column for left-wing foreign interests. At a time of widespread federal budget cuts, the Conservatives have given Canada’s tax agency extra resources to audit registered charities. It’s widely assumed that environmental groups opposing the tar sands are a main target.

This coercive climate prevents Canadians from having an open conversation about the tar sands. Instead, our nation behaves like a gambler deep in the hole, repeatedly doubling down on our commitment to the industry.

President Obama rejected the pipeline last year but now must decide whether to approve a new proposal from TransCanada, the pipeline company. Saying no won’t stop tar sands development by itself, because producers are busy looking for other export routes — west across the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, east to Quebec, or south by rail to the United States. Each alternative faces political, technical or economic challenges as opponents fight to make the industry unviable.

Mr. Obama must do what’s best for America. But stopping Keystone XL would be a major step toward stopping large-scale environmental destruction, the distortion of Canada’s economy and the erosion of its democracy.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, who teaches global governance at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, is the author of “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization.”

When Animals Learn to Control Robots, You Know We’re in Trouble (Wired)

01/04/2013UncategorizedAnimais, Ciborgue, Interação humanos-animais, Mediação tecnológica, Robôsrenzotaddei

BY WIRED SCIENCE

03.21.13 – 6:30 AM

Unless an asteroid or deadly pandemic wipes us out first, the force we are most afraid will rob us of our place as rulers of Earth is robots. The warnings range from sarcastic to nervous to dead serious, but they all describe the same scenario: Robots become sentient, join forces and turn on us en masse.

But with all the paranoia about machines, we’ve ignored another possibility: Animals learn to control robots and decide it’s their turn to rule the planet. This would be even more dangerous than dolphins evolving opposable thumbs. And the first signs of this coming threat are already starting to appear in laboratories around the world where robots are being driven by birds, trained by moths and controlled by the minds of monkeys.

Silkmoth Cruiser

One of the most recent examples of animal-driven robots is this two-wheeled car steered by a male silkmoth. Researchers at the University of Tokyo in Japan placed the moth on a giant white ball that allowed it to control the vehicle much like a hand on a computer mouse. The insect was in hot pursuit of a female silkmoth’s pheromone, which had been laid down by the scientists and, unfortunately for the male, not a lady moth looking for love.

The researchers hoped to characterize the moth’s tracking behavior and perhaps create autonomous robots that can follow chemical smells. The male moth just hoped to impress a classy gal with his sweet cruiser.

Video: Institute of Physics/Youtube

Parrot Drives Buggy

Pepper the Parrot has the good fortune of having an engineer for an owner. Most birds can expect their squawks of boredom to be met by annoyed owners, squirts from a water gun, or exile into a far corner of the house.

But not Pepper. This spoiled parrot received his own set of wheels, complete with infrared sensors to help him avoid hitting walls. Now when Pepper feels lonely, instead of just crying about it he hops on his buggy and drives through the house to where the people are.

Video: Andrew Gray/YouTube

Monkey Controls Robotic Arm

In a lab at Duke University, a neuroscientist is training monkeys to control robots with their minds. The monkeys can control computer cursors, virtual arms, real robotic arms, entire robotic exoskeletons and even whole robots on the other side of the globe. All just by thinking about it.

Much of the research is geared toward helping paralyzed people regain mobility and control. But it’s not hard to imagine how it could lead to a monkey in South America commanding a robot army in California to steal bananas from all the farmers’ markets.

Video: Velliste et.al./YouTube

Cockroach-Controlled Robot

Though probably not the best video to watch over lunch, the cockroach controlling a robot seen here is pretty fascinating. Created by artist Garnet Hertz of UC Irvine, the machine translates the movements of a 5-cm Giant Madagascar Hissing cockroach as it scurries over a large ball. You can almost imagine the little cockroach going “Weeee,” as it runs around strapped into its harness, doing its best to avoid crashing into walls.

According the Hertz, the project is “striving to create a pseudo-intelligent system with the cockroach as the CPU.” The effect is a rather unpredictable creation, with the insect sometimes sitting still for five minutes or suddenly running in circles.

Video: Garnet Hertz/Vimeo

RatCar

RatCar

At the University of Tokyo in Japan, scientists are creating strange hybrids between beast and machine. Seen here is one such animal, known as RatCar.

Intended to be a first step toward helping people with disabilities, RatCar has a brain-machine interface that lets the small rodent move a robot forward with the parts of its brain that ordinarily control its limbs. The result is a somewhat crazy looking cyborg. One day, the research could help paralyzed patients control wheelchairs directly with their brains.

Video: University of Tokyo’s Medical Engineering and Life Science Laboratory via IEEE

Fruit Fly Steers Robot

Swiss scientists have created what they call the Cyborg Fly. In this scheme, a fly is glued to a tether and placed in front of a mini movie screen. The screen plays a movie, and the fly thinks it is actually flying around obstacles. Meanwhile, a vision system tracks the wing motion of the fly and translates it into electronic commands which are sent to a little robot in an actual obstacle course.

This may all seem innocent enough, but the key here is that the fly believes it is flying around, interacting with the environment. Could they fool other animals too? How about humans? What if we are all actually just tethered into a virtual reality, while our robot representatives are the ones actually experiencing the real world?

Video: Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems at ETH Zurich/IEEE Spectrum/YouTube

Robot Driving Ducks

Oh how the tables have turned: All this time animals have been driving robots, but here is a case of a robot driving the animals instead. Specifically, a small Roomba-esque machine is driving a flock of ducks. Known as the Robot Sheepdog, this project was part of the PhD thesis for engineer Richard Vaughan from the University of Oxford back in 1998.

You might be wondering why a robot sheepdog is maneuvering some ducks. It’s simply because the researchers felt that sheep might be too big a hurdle to properly simulate at the time. As biological sheepdogs are first trained with ducks, these fowl seemed the perfect first step. The robot was able to watch the ducks with a camera and, using a mathematical model of their behavior, herd them with relative ease.

Video: Richard Vaughn/Youtube

Unearthed: The Fracking Facade (Top Documentary Films)

01/04/2013UncategorizedDesastre, Energia, Fracking, Gás, Incerteza, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

A video exposing a flawed claim often abused in the sales pitch for promoting shale gas development across the world:

“With a history of 60 years, after nearly a million wells drilled, there are no documented cases that hydraulic fracturing (fracking) has lead to the contamination of groundwater.”

Brought to you by the team behind the upcoming South African feature documentary, Unearthed, that is investigating natural gas development and the controversial method of extraction known as fracking from a global perspective. Should South Africa and other countries drill down?

Watch the full documentary now

The Mathematics of Averting the Next Big Network Failure (Wired)

01/04/2013UncategorizedDesastre, Incerteza, Matemática, Mediação tecnológica, Previsãorenzotaddei

BY NATALIE WOLCHOVER, SIMONS SCIENCE NEWS

03.19.13 – 9:30 AM

Data: Courtesy of Marc Imhoff of NASA GSFC and Christopher Elvidge of NOAA NGDC; Image: Craig Mayhew and Robert Simmon of NASA GSFC

Gene Stanley never walks down stairs without holding the handrail. For a fit 71-year-old, he is deathly afraid of breaking his hip. In the elderly, such breaks can trigger fatal complications, and Stanley, a professor of physics at Boston University, thinks he knows why.

“Everything depends on everything else,” he said.

Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Science News, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Three years ago, Stanley and his colleagues discovered the mathematics behind what he calls “the extreme fragility of interdependency.” In a system of interconnected networks like the economy, city infrastructure or the human body, their model indicates that a small outage in one network can cascade through the entire system, touching off a sudden, catastrophic failure.

First reported in 2010 in the journal Nature, the finding spawned more than 200 related studies, including analyses of the nationwide blackout in Italy in 2003, the global food-price crisis of 2007 and 2008, and the “flash crash” of the United States stock market on May 6, 2010.

“In isolated networks, a little damage will only lead to a little more,” said Shlomo Havlin, a physicist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel who co-authored the 2010 paper. “Now we know that because of dependency between networks, you can have an abrupt collapse.”

While scientists remain cautious about using the results of simplified mathematical models to re-engineer real-world systems, some recommendations are beginning to emerge. Based on data-driven refinements, new models suggest interconnected networks should have backups, mechanisms for severing their connections in times of crisis, and stricter regulations to forestall widespread failure.

“There’s hopefully some sweet spot where you benefit from all the things that networks of networks bring you without being overwhelmed by risk,” said Raissa D’Souza, a complex systems theorist at the University of California, Davis.

Power, gas, water, telecommunications and transportation networks are often interlinked. When nodes in one network depend on nodes in another, node failures in any of the networks can trigger a system-wide collapse. (Illustration: Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio)

To understand the vulnerability in having nodes in one network depend on nodes in another, consider the “smart grid,” an infrastructure system in which power stations are controlled by a telecommunications network that in turn requires power from the network of stations. In isolation, removing a few nodes from either network would do little harm, because signals could route around the outage and reach most of the remaining nodes. But in coupled networks, downed nodes in one automatically knock out dependent nodes in the other, which knock out other dependent nodes in the first, and so on. Scientists model this cascading process by calculating the size of the largest cluster of connected nodes in each network, where the answer depends on the size of the largest cluster in the other network. With the clusters interrelated in this way, a decrease in the size of one of them sets off a back-and-forth cascade of shrinking clusters.

When damage to a system reaches a “critical point,” Stanley, Havlin and their colleagues find that the failure of one more node drops all the network clusters to zero, instantly killing connectivity throughout the system. This critical point will vary depending on a system’s architecture. In one of the team’s most realistic coupled-network models, an outage of just 8 percent of the nodes in one network — a plausible level of damage in many real systems — brings the system to its critical point. “The fragility that’s implied by this interdependency is very frightening,” Stanley said.

However, in another model recently studied by D’Souza and her colleagues, sparse links between separate networks actually help suppress large-scale cascades, demonstrating that network models are not one-size-fits-all. To assess the behavior of smart grids, financial markets, transportation systems and other real interdependent networks, “we have to start from the data-driven, engineered world and come up with the mathematical models that capture the real systems instead of using models because they are pretty and analytically tractable,” D’Souza said.

In a series of papers in the March issue of Nature Physics, economists and physicists used the science of interconnected networks to pinpoint risk within the financial system. In one study, an interdisciplinary group of researchers including the Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz found inherent instabilities within the highly complex, multitrillion-dollar derivatives market and suggested regulations that could help stabilize it.

Irena Vodenska, a professor of finance at Boston University who collaborates with Stanley, custom-fit a coupled network model around data from the 2008 financial crisis. Her and her colleagues’ analysis, published in February in Scientific Reports, showed that modeling the financial system as a network of two networks — banks and bank assets, where each bank is linked to the assets it held in 2007 — correctly predicted which banks would fail 78 percent of the time.

“We consider this model as potentially useful for systemic risk stress testing for financial systems,” said Vodenska, whose research is financially supported by the European Union’s Forecasting Financial Crisis program. As globalization further entangles financial networks, she said, regulatory agencies must monitor “sources of contagion” — concentrations in certain assets, for example — before they can cause epidemics of failure. To identify these sources, “it’s imperative to think in the sense of networks of networks,” she said.

Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio, a civil engineer at Rice, visited a damaged high-voltage substation in Chile after a major earthquake in 2010 to gather information about the power grid’s response to the crisis. (Photo: Courtesy of Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio)

Scientists are applying similar thinking to infrastructure assessment. Leonardo Dueñas-Osorio, a civil engineer at Rice University, is analyzing how lifeline systems responded to recent natural disasters. When a magnitude 8.8 earthquake struck Chile in 2010, for example, most of the power grid was restored after just two days, aiding emergency workers. The swift recovery, Dueñas-Osorio’s researchsuggests, occurred because Chile’s power stations immediately decoupled from the centralized telecommunications system that usually controlled the flow of electricity through the grid, but which was down in some areas. Power stations were operated locally until the damage in other parts of the system subsided.

“After an abnormal event, the majority of the detrimental effects occur in the very first cycles of mutual interaction,” said Dueñas-Osorio, who is also studying New York City’s response to Hurricane Sandy last October. “So when something goes wrong, we need to have the ability to decouple networks to prevent the back-and-forth effects between them.”

D’Souza and Dueñas-Osorio are collaborating to build accurate models of infrastructure systems in Houston, Memphis and other American cities in order to identify system weaknesses. “Models are useful for helping us explore alternative configurations that could be more effective,” Dueñas-Osorio explained. And as interdependency between networks naturally increases in many places, “we can model that higher integration and see what happens.”

Scientists are also looking to their models for answers on how to fix systems when they fail. “We are in the process of studying what is the optimal way to recover a network,” Havlin said. “When networks fail, which node do you fix first?”

The hope is that networks of networks might be unexpectedly resilient for the same reason that they are vulnerable. As Dueñas-Osorio put it, “By making strategic improvements, can we have what amounts to positive cascades, where a small improvement propagates much larger benefits?”

These open questions have the attention of governments around the world. In the U.S., the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an organization tasked with safeguarding national infrastructure against weapons of mass destruction, considers the study of interdependent networks its “top mission priority” in the category of basic research. Some defense applications have emerged already, such as a new design for electrical network systems at military bases. But much of the research aims at sorting through the mathematical subtleties of network interaction.

“We’re not yet at the ‘let’s engineer the internet differently’ level,” said Robin Burk, an information scientist and former DTRA program manager who led the agency’s focus on interdependent networks research. “A fair amount of it is still basic science — desperately needed science.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Simons Science News, an editorially independent division of SimonsFoundation.org whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

Brain Scans Predict Which Criminals Are Most Likely to Reoffend (Wired)

01/04/2013UncategorizedCrime, Justiça, Mediação tecnológica, neurociências, Tecnocracia, Tecnofetichismo, Violênciarenzotaddei

BY GREG MILLER

03.26.13 – 3:40 PM

Photo: Erika Kyte/Getty Images

Brain scans of convicted felons can predict which ones are most likely to get arrested after they get out of prison, scientists have found in a study of 96 male offenders.

“It’s the first time brain scans have been used to predict recidivism,” said neuroscientist Kent Kiehl of the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque, New Mexico, who led the new study. Even so, Kiehl and others caution that the method is nowhere near ready to be used in real-life decisions about sentencing or parole.

Generally speaking, brain scans or other neuromarkers could be useful in the criminal justice system if the benefits in terms of better accuracy outweigh the likely higher costs of the technology compared to conventional pencil-and-paper risk assessments, says Stephen Morse, a legal scholar specializing in criminal law and neuroscience at the University of Pennsylvania. The key questions to ask, Morse says, are: “How much predictive accuracy does the marker add beyond usually less expensive behavioral measures? How subject is it to counter-measures if a subject wishes to ‘defeat’ a scan?”

Those are still open questions with regard to the new method, which Kiehl and colleagues, including postdoctoral fellow Eyal Aharoni, describe in a paper to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The test targets impulsivity. In a mobile fMRI scanner the researchers trucked in to two state prisons, they scanned inmates’ brains as they did a simple impulse control task. Inmates were instructed to press a button as quickly as possible whenever they saw the letter X pop up on a screen inside the scanner, but not to press it if they saw the letter K. The task is rigged so that X pops up 84 percent of the time, which predisposes people to hit the button and makes it harder to suppress the impulse to press the button on the rare trials when a K pops up.

Based on previous studies, the researchers focused on the anterior cingulate cortex, one of several brain regions thought to be important for impulse control. Inmates with relatively low activity in the anterior cingulate made more errors on the task, suggesting a correlation with poor impulse control.

They were also more likely to get arrested after they were released. Inmates with relatively low anterior cingulate activity were roughly twice as likely as inmates with high anterior cingulate activity to be rearrested for a felony offense within 4 years of their release, even after controlling for other behavioral and psychological risk factors.

“This is an exciting new finding,” said Essi Viding, a professor of developmental psychopathology at University College London. “Interestingly this brain activity measure appears to be a more robust predictor, in particular of non-violent offending, than psychopathy or drug use scores, which we know to be associated with a risk of reoffending.” However, Viding notes that Kiehl’s team hasn’t yet tried to compare their fMRI test head to head against pencil-and-paper tests specifically designed to assess the risk of recidivism. ”It would be interesting to see how the anterior cingulate cortex activity measure compares against these measures,” she said.

“It’s a great study because it brings neuroimaging into the realm of prediction,” said clinical psychologistDustin Pardini of the University of Pittsburgh. The study’s design is an improvement over previous neuroimaging studies that compared groups of offenders with groups of non-offenders, he says. All the same, he’s skeptical that brain scans could be used to predict the behavior of a given individual. ”In general we’re horrible at predicting human behavior, and I don’t see this as being any different, at least not in the near future.”

Even if the findings hold up in a larger study, there would be limitations, Pardini adds. “In a practical sense, there are just too many ways an offender could get around having an accurate representation of his brain activity taken,” he said. For example, if an offender moves his head while inside the scanner, that would render the scan unreadable. Even more subtle strategies, such as thinking about something unrelated to the task, or making mistakes on purpose, could also thwart the test.

Kiehl isn’t convinced either that this type of fMRI test will ever prove useful for assessing the risk to society posed by individual criminals. But his group is collecting more data — lots more — as part of a much larger study in the New Mexico state prisons. “We’ve scanned 3,000 inmates,” he said. “This is just the first 100.”

Kiehl hopes this work will point to new strategies for reducing criminal behavior. If low activity in the anterior cingulate does in fact turn out to be a reliable predictor of recidivism, perhaps therapies that boost activity in this region would improve impulse control and prevent future crimes, Kiehl says. He admits it’s speculative, but his group is already thinking up experiments to test the idea. ”Cognitive exercises is where we’ll start,” he said. “But I wouldn’t rule out pharmaceuticals.”

Something Other Than Adaptation Could Be Driving Evolution (Wired)

01/04/2013UncategorizedAnimais, ciência, Darwinismo, Evolucionismorenzotaddei

BY BRANDON KEIM

03.28.13

A computational model of greenish warbler evolution (left) fits real-world patterns of the species (right). Color corresponds to degrees of genetic difference. Image: Martins et al./PNAS

What explains the incredible variety of life on Earth? It seems obvious. Evolution, of course! But perhaps not the evolution most people grew up with.

Some ecologists say the theory needs an update. They’ve proposed a new dynamic driving the emergence of new species, one that doesn’t involve adaptations or survival of the fittest.

Give evolution enough time and space, they say, and new species can just happen. Speciation might not only be an evolutionary consequence of fitness differences and natural selection, but a property intrinsic to evolution, just as all matter has gravity.

“Our work shows that evolution wants to be diverse,” said Yaneer Bar-Yam, president of the New England Complex Systems Institute. “It’s enough for organisms to be spread out in space and time.”

In a March 13 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, Bar-Yam and his co-authors, Brazilian ecologists Ayana Martins at the University of Sao Paulo and Marcus Aguiar at the University of Campinas, modeled the evolution of greenish warblers living around the Tibetan plateau.

The warblers are what’s known as a ring species, a rare phenomenon that occurs when species inhabit a horseshoe-shaped range. Genes flow around the ring, passing between neighboring populations — yet at the ring’s tips, the animals no longer interbreed with one another.

By the usual standards, these end populations have become new species. According to the researchers’ model of the process, no special adaptations or differences in reproductive fitness are needed to explain — or at least to computationally replicate — the greenish warblers’ divergence.

‘An alternative hypothesis to adaptation and selection of new species.’

“This sounds kind of crazy, right? We normally think of species as being adapted for particular functions. They have their own role to play in a community. That’s the standard wisdom,” said theoretical ecologist James O’Dwyer of the Santa Fe Institute, who was not involved in the study.

Instead, over 2,000 modeled generations, a time frame that fits with the 10,000 years that greenish warblers have ringed the Tibetan plateau’s slopes since their exposure by retreating glaciers, random genetic mutations drifted through the birds’ populations, ultimately clustering in diversity patterns resembling what’s seen in reality.

Adaptation and natural selection certainly played a part in the warblers’ evolution, said Bar-Yam, but they weren’t necessarily the driving forces. And though geography is involved, it’s very different from the population-isolating physical separation created by mountain ranges or islands.

“The plateau plays an important role in the formation of the ring species, but it does not block gene flow,” said Aguiar. “No barriers and no specific selection processes are required.” Rather than adaptation, distance is the driver.

That notion falls under the umbrella of neutral biodiversity theory, a dry-sounding name for a dramatic challenge to the notion that adaptation is biological diversity’s wellspring. First articulated by University of California, Los Angeles ecologist Stephen Hubbell, who in 2001 published The Unified Neutral Theory of Biodiversity and Biogeography, it’s a challenge occasioned by the surprising difficulty of explaining biodiversity, or why life is arranged the way it is.

Neutral biodiversity doesn’t reject the usual evolutionary drivers of adaptation and geographic isolation, which are clearly at work in shaping species traits and generating diversity. But these drivers don’t seem to explain many big-picture patterns. It’s not just ring species that are perplexing. Tropical forests, which originally inspired Hubbell’s theory, seemingly have far more species than there are niches to adaptively inhabit. Common patterns of species distribution also occur in disparate places, such as rain forests and coral reefs. The usual evolutionary models didn’t fit these phenomena.

A greenish warbler in Taibai Shan, China. Image: Ron Knight/Flickr

Some under-appreciated forces seemed to be operating, which Hubbell identified as neutral genetic drift: the flow, at landscape-level scales, of random genetic variations that emerge in individuals and spread through populations, but are ‘neutral,’ having no biological function.

That most mutations are neutral isn’t a new idea. It was first proposed in the late 1960s by Japanese geneticist Mootoo Kimura, and is an established dynamic in population genetics. That it might actually drive diversity on its own, though, accounting for substantial differences between species, was new.

How exactly this might work and how important it could be has been hotly debated ever since, at least in ecological circles. Some ecologists reject the idea altogether. Other researchers, including Bar-Yam’s group, have built on Hubbell’s original ideas.

Their work “offers an alternative hypothesis to adaptation and selection of new species,” said O’Dwyer, but he warned that it’s hard to tell whether neutral processes really occur. Computational models of neutral biodiversity often seem to predict real-world patterns, as with the greenish warblers, but that doesn’t mean they’re right.

Datasets necessary to test neutral explanations need to span hundreds if not thousands of years, and should encompass not just a few species but entire ecosystems, said O’Dwyer. He thinks some combination of neutral and non-neutral processes likely shape biodiversity, and teasing their contributions apart will be difficult.

Ecologist Rampal Etienne of the University of Groningen, whose own research suggests that sexual reproduction makes evolution speed up, echoed O’Dwyer’s point. “The major question is what data will be able to distinguish neutral from non-neutral explanations,” said Etienne, who cautioned against jumping to conclusions with Bar-Yam’s model.

Like any model, it’s based on assumptions and only imperfectly imitates reality, he said. Its more fundamental value, as with other work on neutral biodiversity, is that it critically examines whether adaptation really explains the natural world’s richness.

In other words, the theory of evolution is still evolving.

Citation: “Evolution and stability of ring species.” By Ayana B. Martins, Marcus A. M. de Aguiar and Yaneer Bar-Yam. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 11, 2013.

Update 3/28: Text modified to emphasize that neutral biodiversity theory does not exclude ‘traditional’ evolutionary mechanisms, but would be an addition to them.

New Models For Clean Energy Funding Offer Hope (Earth Techling)

01/04/2013UncategorizedEconomia, Energia, Energia solar, Mudanças climáticasrenzotaddei

by Institute For Local Self-Reliance

March 23rd, 2013

Three years ago, the prospects for Americans to own their energy future seemed relatively bleak. There were almost no replicable models for doing community-based energy projects or investment, despite falling costs and technology – solar and wind – that lend themselves to local development.

But thanks to recent opportunities in community solar and crowdfunding, we may see a renewable energy market in America where everyone wins.

Let’s start with solar. It’s the ultimate decentralized renewable energy – sunshine falls everywhere – and its cost is falling so fast that, within a decade, 300 gigawatts of unsubsidized solar will be competitive with local electricity prices in communities across the country. In 2010, just one model for developing community solar had proved readily replicable and there was no practical way to pool a community’s collective capital to invest in local energy (except perhaps a municipal utility, a story for another time). Since nearly three-quarters of residential rooftops are not suitable for solar, it was hard to see how most Americans could use the sun to brighten their energy future.

But in 2013, community solar is rising fast. Colorado’s community solar gardens program – selling out its 9 megawatt limit in a half hour – illustrates a powerful model for letting people pool their money to go solar, even if their own roof isn’t theirs or isn’t sunny. Some companies in Colorado have already brought their model to other states, like the Clean Energy Collective‘s community solar project with the Wright-Hennepin Electric Cooperative in Minnesota, and other states (like Minnesota) are considering legislation to expand the opportunity.

mosaic solar crowdfunding kickstarter

image via Mosaic

The year 2013 may also be remembered for opening the crowdfunding floodgates.

In late 2012, California-based (Solar) Mosaic launched their first community solar investment project, allowing 51 California investors earn 6.38% returns for investing in a 47 kilowatt (kW) solar array on the roof of the Youth Employment Partnership in Oakland. Their subsequent 235 kW project ups the ante, and was open to regular folks in California and New York (and accredited investors in all 50 states). It sold out in just 24 hours to over 400 investors with an average stake of just $700. The investment uses a common securities law exemption (Rule 506 of Regulation D), and investors will earn a 4.5% annual return (net of fees) over 9 years, greening the economy and their pocketbooks.

The key advantage of Solar Mosaic is the investment. Previous community solar projects have relied on shared electricity savings for participants, sometimes called virtual net metering. This limits prospective investors to the same utility service territory, and the savings can’t be taken to a property outside that area. The Mosaic model turns community solar into a simple investment, letting prospective investors select a particular Mosaic project to invest in, with significantly higher returns than parking money in a U.S. Treasury or savings account. For now, it’s limited to broad participation in just two states, New York and California, but Mosaic is “working hard” to expand the opportunity.

Mosaic may be just the first salvo in a firestorm of community renewable energy investment. The federal JOBS Act of 2012 intends to create a new segment of investment security with much lower upfront and legal costs that would let crowds pool up to $1 million for solar and other renewable energy projects.The only “drawback” in the Mosaic model is that it doesn’t explicitly connect geography with investment. A New York City resident, for example, can invest in a project in California, but not in Manhattan or the Bronx. If this model continues to be successful, however, it’s likely that will change.

Crowdfunding doesn’t have to be limited to renewable energy, either. People could pool their resources to invest in block-by-block residential energy efficiency retrofits, reducing their own and their neighbors’ energy bills and sharing the energy savings with other local investors. Crowdfunding for energy efficiency could be combined with commercial building energy ratings (just enacted in Minneapolis, MN, for example) to target the least efficient buildings with the most potential for savings. Local shared investment wouldn’t just tap and share more energy savings, but would boost the local economy by putting idled laborers to work making buildings more cost-effective and less climate harming.

Both community solar and crowdfunding are in their infancy, but they represent two powerful tools for Americans to take charge of their energy future.

A Thousand Kinds of Life: Culture, Nature, and Anthropology (Dissent)

01/04/2013UncategorizedAntropologia, Índios, Chagnon, Racismo, Sahlins, Violência, Yanomamirenzotaddei

Yanomami villagers at an indigenous expo in Caracas (Luigino Bracci, 2011, Flickr creative commons)

By David Moberg – March 21, 2013

In the latest twist in an unusually public academic dispute, one of the world’s most influential and highly regarded anthropologists resigned in protest from the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in late February. In quitting the academy, Marshall Sahlins took aim in part at the work of fellow anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon, whose contentious memoir, Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes—The Yanamamö and the Anthropologists, was recently published by Simon & Schuster. But his action is also a skirmish in a much longer and very important debate over what it means to be human—a debate with consequences for the broader public discussion.

Sahlins, the Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Chicago, said that he was leaving the 150-year-old academy for two reasons: the election of Chagnon to the NAS last year and the involvement of the NAS in research for the military. His action prompted an outpouring of petitions and statements of support from colleagues, including several hundred in Brazil.

The academy says that principled resignations like Sahlins’ are “rare”—so rare that the only precedent anyone could identify was famed Harvard biologist and geneticist Richard Lewontin’s 1971 departure in protest against NAS military work related to the war in Vietnam. In the 1960s Sahlins himself was helping to launch campus teach-ins against the Vietnam War and to raise issues about the relationship of anthropology to the military.

Sahlins initially tried to resign last year in May, after Chagnon was named to the NAS, then again in October, when he received a request sent to all eighty-four anthropologists at the academy for advice on two research projects aimed at making the military more effective. The request arrived at a time when a controversy was already smoldering in the field about anthropologists’ involvement in implementing the Human Terrain Systems counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq (the October request for help appears unrelated to HTS). The academy had indirectly been involved in military research since the allied National Research Council was established in 1916 specifically for military research. But Sahlins objected to any NAS involvement in projects such as the two proposed in October. One focused on “contextual factors that influence individual and small unit behavior,” and the other sought scientifically valid methods, including any suggested by neuroscience, for improving individual and group military performance.

The publication of Chagnon’s memoirs prompted a third, successful attempt at resignation. Sahlins had objected to the NAS admitting Chagnon—formerly at the Universities of Michigan and of California at Santa Barbara, now at the University of Missouri—because of the quality of his research and his ethics in the field. Sahlins is also critical of both the theoretical and empirical underpinnings of sociobiology, more often referred to now as evolutionary psychology. A minority of anthropologists adopt its viewpoint. But many non-anthropologists—such as Richard Dawkins, Stephen Pinker, and Jared Diamond—have used the work of Chagnon and like-minded anthropologists to reach a large audience.

Fundamentally, this group of writers and researchers see biology as destiny. They argue that biological evolution defines human nature through the inheritance of traits that provide individuals with a reproductive advantage—that is, with more offspring.

In the late 1960s Chagnon worked among the Yanomami people living on both sides of the border between Venezuela and Brazil. He portrayed the Yanomami—which he dubbed “the fierce people,” for their frequent inter-village warfare—as living in a “state of nature” essentially like that of our Paleolithic ancestors. And he claimed to present evidence that men who were “killers” had many more offspring—which, even when he occasionally hedged, others took as proof that evolution favored and preserved traits for male aggression and violence.

Anthropologists, including Sahlins, have since criticized nearly every aspect of Chagnon’s research. (See “Natural Born Nonkillers.”) For example, many note that other tribal people have relatively peaceful, cooperative cultures. Research from various perspectives also runs counter to Chagnon’s argument that evolution rewards killers with more offspring—including computer simulations of evolution, studies of animal behavior showing that killing within a species is rare, even military studies of how men in combat try to avoid killing others. In any case, critics say, the Yanomami were not in a pristine state of nature when Chagnon first visited: they had a history, including likely displacement from their original land by pressures from European colonial settlers and some continuing contact with the wider world that led to the acquisition of a few trade goods. There were many more charges that his data were flawed. To take one example, Chagnon categorized Yanomami men as killers or not killers based on their own classification as unokai or not unokai. But the term identifies a man who has gone through a purification ritual, which was used by both real “killers” and by men who, say, had employed sorcery.

In 2000 journalist Patrick Tierney published Darkness in El Dorado, which accused Chagnon of spreading fatal diseases (like measles) through his collaboration with geneticist James V. Neel, of fomenting some of the inter-village fighting, and other ethical offenses. The American Anthropological Association established a taskforce that dismissed some of Tierney’s most lurid charges but concluded that Chagnon, among other lapses, did not get informed consent from Yanomami research subjects and may have improperly delayed immunizations he and Neel were providing. At its convention, the AAA adopted the taskforce’s report and criticisms, but later Chagnon’s supporters moved to rescind the report largely on procedural grounds. With only 10 percent of members voting, the AAA reversed its endorsement of the report—which Chagnon backers inappropriately claimed as the profession’s vindication of his work.

Sahlins first weighed in against sociobiology in the mid-1970s with The Use and Abuse of Biology, but he has continued to pursue many of the same critical themes in recent books, such as What Kinship Is—And Is Not and The Western Illusion of Human Nature. He argues that human nature is culture—that is, the learned values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that social groups follow or believe they should follow, as well as the capacity to change those ideas passed from previous generations. Culture—and not some special features of biological evolution, like a carnivore’s teeth or the short beak of a seed-eating bird—provides humans with a flexible, varied means of adapting to a wide and changing variety of circumstances.

Homo sapiens evolved biologically and mentally from our hominid ancestors over several million years within the context of the hominid tool-making culture. “What evolved was our capacity to realize biological necessities, from sex to nutrition, in the thousand different ways that different societies have developed,” Sahlins says. “Hence, culture, the symbolically organized modes of the ways we live, including our bodily functioning, is the specifically ‘human nature.’”

Sahlins argues against the sociobiologists’ neo-Hobbesian view of human nature as a war of all against all—with a brutal, competitive nature clashing with culture. This view of human nature has deep roots in Western cultural traditions, he writes, but it also projects a more modern capitalist view of self-interested, even selfish, behavior on both humanity and the rest of the natural world. In many other societies, people do not see the same sharp division between nature and culture. And all human societies have systems of kinship, which Sahlins defines as “mutuality of being,” meaning that “kinfolk are members of one another, intrinsic to each other’s identity and existence.”

“Symbolically and emotionally, kinfolk live each other’s lives and die each other’s deaths,” Sahlins says. “Why don’t scientists base their ideas of human nature on this truly universal condition—a condition in which self-interest at the expense of others is precluded by definition, insofar as people are parts of one another?” Sahlins cites a classic definition of kinship first developed by Aristotle: kinfolk are in various degrees other selves of ourselves.

Moreover, this kinship is not biological. There are many ways besides birth that societies have developed notions of mutual being, Sahlins says. For example, in the highlands of New Guinea, strangers can become your kin by eating from the land where your ancestors are buried. The food raised on that land is in effect the transubstantiation of the ancestors. Accordingly, people who eat from it share ancestral being. In the local conception, they are as much kin to each other as people who have the same parents.

In the West, and even in much anthropological writing past and present, kinship is treated as genealogy, or biology. But even biological reproduction, Sahlins argues, takes place within the context of a particular kinship system, and to reproduce children is to reproduce that culturally defined kinship order. And in most cultures, notions of kinship diverge, often dramatically, from our “folk theory,” with its emphasis on biological genealogy. In any case, all human societies exist within some framework of “mutuality of being,” which starkly contrasts with the view of human life run by selfish genes.

In an email interview, Sahlins responded to a few questions about his resignation, incorporating some passages from his recent writings.

DM: You offered two reasons for your resignation from the National Academy of Sciences. Starting with the election of Napoleon Chagnon to the NAS, what were your most important objections to that election—the quality of his scholarship, professional ethics in the field, or other issues?

MS: He deals in caricature: of the people he studies, of science, of anthropological theory, of fellow anthropologists, and of himself as a beleaguered “fierce person.” His vicious misrepresentations of Yanomami as savage and disgusting have, as many local scholars have pointed out, aided and abetted national and entrepreneurial forces anxious to exploit and pollute their land and, directly or indirectly, drive them to extinction. Likewise, his own fieldwork methods have contributed to the sufferings and destabilization of the Yanomami (as I discussed in an article for the Washington Post).

The idea that the Yanomami represent the primordial human condition of the Stone Age is preposterous. Why them and not the numerous other, quite different societies—including many, such as Australian aboriginals, with just as modest economies but a quite different social order and inter-group relationships? In fact, all have long histories, including dynamic relations with other societies, that remove them as far from the Paleolithic as modern nations. Moreover, as other studies of Yanomami show, they have a richness of oral tradition (so-called mythology), a spiritual pantheon, and a metaphysics of culture and nature that is virtually totally ignored by Chagnon where it is not simply dismissed.

Compared to the rich fieldwork of many Amazonian anthropologists, his ethnography is shallow. His generalizations are sophomoric. His thesis about the reproductive success of Yanomami warriors, contradicted by his own data, has been thoroughly refuted by others. His evolutionary anthropology is from the ancien régime, outdated by almost a century.

DM: You argue that “biologism” is the problem, that “human nature is culture,” and that Western thought in general is dominated by the idea that there is a conflict between a disruptive human nature and vulnerable culture. How would you address a predictable layperson’s view that surely human nature must be at least in part an independent biology as well as culture? What essential qualities, if any, do you think “human nature” may have if it is indeed defined in terms of culture?

MS: Yes, all cultures have sex, aggression, etc., but whether and how it is expressed is subordinate to the cultural order. Sociobiologists say that individuals achieve immortality by having many children, but apparently no one ever told that to the Catholic clergy. The important point is not that all cultures have sex, but that all sex has culture, that is, social norms that specify with whom, how, where, and when sexual relations are appropriate or inappropriate. Culture preceded modern human physical form by a million years or more. The body of the modern human species, Homo sapiens, was formed under the aegis of culture. What evolved was the ability and necessity to realize our bodily needs and dispositions in cultural forms.

Biology became the dependent variable. These needs had to be subordinate to and encompassed by their cultural forms of expression, otherwise how could the same needs or dispositions be realized in the thousands of different ways known to history and ethnography—the various cultural ways of having sex, eating, being aggressive, and the like? As Clifford Geertz put it, we “all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end in the end having lived only one.” That can only be if our natural dispositions were subject to cultural ordering rather than the source thereof.

For over two thousand years, Western people have been haunted recurrently by the specter of their own inner being: an apparition of human nature so covetous and contentious that unless it is somehow governed it will plunge society into anarchy. Indeed, by the twentieth century the worst in us had become the best. In the neoliberal view, self-interest in the form of each person’s pursuit of happiness at the cost of whom it might concern was a god-given right. The insatiable love of the flesh that for Augustine was slavery became “freedom” itself. Likewise, then, political Augustinism has been reversed: self-interest having been transformed from slavery to liberty, the least government is now the best. Although for neoliberalism the ancient vice of self-love is greatly to be desired, in other native anthropologies it remains a potentially fatal quality of the human make-up.

DM: Given the harsh criticism of Chagnon’s work by the American Anthropological Association, the leading professional academic organization in the field, how do you account for the NAS decision and for the apparent popular appeal of his work, such as suggested by two recent, highly sympathetic articles about him and his new memoir in the New York Times?

MS: NAS decision? I am not sure, but I believe that many members, those who elected him, have a natural science sense of anthropology, as archaeologists almost have by necessity, and Chagnon promotes himself under that description. Popularity? Mostly on college campuses, I would think, from his textbooks and movies, which resonate with certain popular undergraduate preoccupations: sex, drugs, and violence. America.

DM: You also said that you were resigning because the NAS was supporting social science research on improving combat performance of the U.S. military. To what extent is support for such military-related research a new or growing development within the NAS?

MS: Since resigning I have learned that the NAS, with its charter of research for the nation, engaged in secret military research as far back as the Vietnam War, and who knows how much before or since. At least one prominent scientist, the extraordinary biologist Richard Lewontin, has resigned from the NAS for that reason. Professor Lewontin did so in 1971.

DM: You suggest that NAS should instead, if it does anything in the field, study how to promote peace. Do you have any suggestions about what sort of research would be useful for anthropologists or others to pursue to that end?

MS: What are the consequences of attempts to forcefully impose democracy on societies with no such traditions? Especially, how does the imposition of “winner-take-all” democratic elections in ethnically divided societies exacerbate violence, as has happened time and again in many postcolonial societies in recent decades? How does the reframing of local differences in terms of international issues, backed by opposed international forces, create a virtual state of nature, as happened in Iraq, India, Sri Lanka, and many other similar situations, going back to the encompassment of local disputes in the opposition between democratic-imperial Athens and oligarchic Sparta in the Peloponnesian War? (See “Iraq, The State of Nature Effect.”)

DM: Finally, do you see any connection between your two reasons for resigning or are they independent motivations?

MS: There is a connection: it is referenced in one of my answers in a Counterpunch article by David Price. The premise of American overseas aggression, according to Donald Rumsfeld and others, is something like the line in the movie Full Metal Jacket: “inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.” All we have to do to liberate this innately freedom-loving, self-interested, democracy-needing, capitalist-in-waiting is to rid him of the oppressive, evil-minded regime holding him down—by force if necessary. That is, Chagnon’s view of self-aggrandizing human nature is the sociobiological equivalent of the neocon premise of the virtues of American imperialism: making the world safe for self-interest. It is the same native Western ideology of the innate character of mankind. A huge ethnocentric and egocentric philosophy of human nature underlies the double imperialism of our sociobiological science and our global militarism.

David Moberg is a senior editor at In These Times.

Mudanças climáticas afetam previsões astrológicas dos índios amazônicos (UOL Notícias)

31/03/2013UncategorizedÍndios, Clima, Desastre, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Previsãorenzotaddei

Carlos A. Moreno

Da EFE, no Rio de Janeiro

31/03/201311h59

Crianças da aldeia ticuna brincam no Rio Solimões, no Amazonas; os ticunas são uma das tribos afetadas pelas mudanças climáticas. Patrícia Santos – 30.nov.1999/Folhapress

As previsões que os índios da Amazônia brasileira fazem com a ajuda dos astros para determinar o melhor momento para plantar ou pescar, entre outras atividades, se veem afetadas pelas mudanças climáticas, segundo constatou um estudo realizado com diferentes etnias indígenas no Brasil.

“Os xamãs passaram a se queixar que suas previsões estavam perdendo a exatidão e, a partir dessas indagações, descobrimos que alguns fenômenos provocados pelas mudanças climáticas afetavam seus cálculos”, explicou à Agência Efe o astrônomo Germano Afonso, coordenador do estudo.

Segundo o especialista, que é doutor em Astronomia e Mecânica Celeste pela francesa Universidade Pierre et Marie Curie, os índios da Amazônia ainda utilizam o conhecimento astrológico ancestral para determinar seu calendário e programar, entre outras coisas, a melhor data para plantar, colher, caçar, pescar e, até mesmo, realizar seus rituais religiosos.

Afonso, que construiu e opera – com ajuda dos índios – um observatório solar na Amazônia, explicou que a observação ou não de diferentes constelações, assim como o deslocamento das mesmas, fazem com que os xamãs prevejam os momentos de chuva e seca, das cheias dos rios, da fertilidade da terra e da procriação dos peixes.

“No entanto, nas tribos com as quais trabalhamos, os próprios xamãs admitem que suas previsões não estavam sendo exatas, já que as chuvas se antecipavam ou se atrasavam e os rios secavam antes do tempo previsto. O curioso é que eles mesmos culpavam às mudanças climáticas”, declarou o astrônomo, que é professor da Universidade do Estado do Paraná e autor de diferentes obras sobre o assunto, como “O Céu dos Índios Tembé”.

A equipe coordenada por Afonso e contratada pela Fundação de Apoio à pesquisa no Estado do Amazonas (Fapeam) para estudar o assunto decidiu contrastar o conhecimento indígena de diferentes etnias – Tukano, Tupé, Dessana, Baré, Tuyuka, Baniwa e Tikuna – com as medições meteorológicas da região para tentar identificar as falhas nas previsões.

“Com essa análise percebemos que alguns fenômenos provocados pelas mudanças climáticas estavam desvirtuando as previsões, tendo em vista que a chuva se atrasava ou se antecipava por fenômenos como El Niño e o desmatamento”, apontou o especialista, que passou a morar em São Gabriel da Cachoeira, uma cidade amazônica na qual confluem várias etnias e onde construiu o Observatório Solar Indígena.

Afonso esclareceu que esse problema não pode ser atribuído diretamente ao aquecimento global, mas também aos fenômenos que causam o efeito estufa e os que são provocados pelo mesmo, como o desmatamento da Amazônia, a poluição ambiental e a construção de represas na floresta.

Tais fenômenos, segundo os especialistas, alteram os períodos de chuva e de cheia dos rios na Amazônia, que já não podem ser previstos a partir do conhecimento astronômico acumulado por séculos e transmitido oralmente entre os índios.

Após a constatação do problema, os pesquisadores responsáveis pelo estudo iniciaram um projeto para transmitir aos xamãs alguns conhecimentos científicos e, com isso, ajudá-los a corrigir suas previsões.

“Estamos usando cálculos astronômicos modernos e as informações recolhidas pelas estações meteorológicas da região para ajudá-los a aperfeiçoar seus cálculos”, explicou Afonso.

“Recuperamos o conhecimento astrológico que eles transmitem oralmente e comparamos com dados científicos para fazer alguns ajustes e permitir que as previsões sejam mais precisas”, completou.

De acordo com Afonso, com previsões mais exatas, os índios seguirão confiando em sua capacidade de interpretar os astros e na precisão de seus conhecimentos – o melhor, sem se afastarem de sua cultura.

“Mas só transmitimos os dados que podem ajudá-los. Não nos introduzimos mais. Não queremos invadir, deslegitimar e nem modificar nada de sua cultura. O projeto tem dois objetivos claros: recuperar o conhecimento astrológico dos índios e ajudá-los a melhorar suas previsões. Trata-se de uma troca”, exaltou o pesquisador.

Segundo o astrônomo, essa troca teve uma boa recepção devido ao fato de que a maioria de seus colaboradores no projeto são universitários e indígenas, alguns filhos ou netos de caciques e xamãs das tribos onde nasceram.

Latour: “No estaba escrito que la ecología fuera un partido” (El País)

31/03/2013Uncategorizedambientalismo, Antropologia, Capitalismo, ciência, Clima, discurso ambiental, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Latour, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Previsão, sociedade civilrenzotaddei

ENTREVISTA

“No estaba escrito que la ecología fuera un partido”

Sociólogo, antropólogo, filósofo y director científico del Instituto de Estudios Políticos de París.

Bruno Latour tiene una mirada ácida y provocadora de la sociedad y el medio ambiente.

MIGUEL MORA 25 MAR 2013 – 11:52 CET19

Bruno Latour. / MANUEL BRAUN

¿Ha servido para algo el activismo ecológico? ¿Han forjado los verdes una política común? ¿Escuchan los políticos a los científicos cuando alertan sobre el cambio climático? ¿Puede la Tierra soportar más agresiones? El sociólogo, antropólogo y filósofo francés Bruno Latour(Beaune, 1947) lleva más de 20 años reflexionando sobre estos asuntos, y su pronóstico es desolador. A su juicio, la llegada de los ecologistas a la política ha sido un fracaso porque los verdes han renunciado al debate inteligente, los políticos se limitan a aplicar viejas recetas sin darse cuenta de que la revolución se ha producido ya y fue “una catástrofe”: ocurrió en 1947, cuando la población mundial superó el número que garantizaba el acceso a los recursos. Según Latour, es urgente poner en marcha una nueva forma de hacer ecología política, basada en una constitución que comprometa a gobernantes, científicos y ciudadanos a garantizar el futuro de la Tierra. Esta idea es una de las propuestas de su libro Políticas de la naturaleza. Por una democracia de las ciencias, publicado en Francia en 1999 y que ahora edita en español RBA.

Latour, aire de sabio despistado, recibe a El País Semanal en su caótico y enorme despacho del Instituto de Estudios Políticos de París, del que es director científico y director adjunto desde 2007.

PREGUNTA: Este libro se publicó en Francia hace ya 14 años. ¿Sigue suscribiendo lo que escribió?

RESPUESTA: Casi todo, sí. Pero las cosas no han mejorado. He seguido trabajando en lo mismo, pero con otro tono. Hoy debo de ser el único que se ocupa de estas cuestiones, de una filosofía política que exige una verdadera política ecologista. Lo que no ha funcionado es que pensé que iba a ser un libro fundador para los ecologistas. ¡Y ha sido un fracaso total! Los ecologistas han desaparecido.

P: En Francia al menos hay verdes en el Gobierno.

R: Sí, pero tienen una visión muy estrecha de la ecología, no reflexionan ni sobre la economía ni sobre la sociedad. La ecología está limitada a las cuestiones de la naturaleza, cuando en realidad no tiene nada que ver con eso. Hay que elegir entre naturaleza y política. Desgraciadamente, se ha intentado hacer una política ecologista que no ha producido nada bueno porque se ha basado en la lucha tradicional, que tenía como objetivo torpedear la política o, mejor, someterla; en cierto modo, los verdes actúan como un tribunal que trata de definir una especie de soberanía.

P: ¿De superioridad moral o natural?

R: Sí, pero sobre todo de estupidez. Evidentemente, el tomar la naturaleza como un fin no ha hecho más que debilitar la posición de los ecologistas, que nunca han sido capaces de hacer política; en fin, auténtica política en el sentido de la tradición socialista, en la que se hubieran debido inspirar. No han hecho el trabajo que el socialismo primero, el marxismo después y luego la socialdemocracia hicieron. No ha habido, para nada, un trabajo de invención intelectual, de exploración; han preferido “el escaparate”. Puede que no hubiera otra solución, pues no estaba escrito que la ecología se fuera a convertir en un partido.

“Hay una ecología profunda con un gran papel en EE UU y alemania”

P: ¿Entonces el ecologismo es hoy una especie de activismo sin conexión científica?

R: Ha habido movimientos interesantes gracias a una casuística muy concreta, importante en lo que concierne a los animales, las plantas, los dientes de los elefantes, el agua, los ríos, etcétera. Han mostrado además gran energía en las cuestiones locales, pero sin afrontar las cuestiones de la política, de la vida en común. Por eso el ecologismo sigue siendo marginal, justo en un momento en que las cuestiones ecológicas se han convertido en un asunto de todos. Y se da una paradoja: la ecología se ocupa de temas minúsculos relacionados con la naturaleza y la sociedad mientras que la cuestión de la Tierra, la presencia de la Tierra en la política, se hace cada vez más apremiante. Esa urgencia, que ya era acuciante hace 10 o 15 años, lo es mucho más ahora.

P: ¿Quizá ha faltado formar una Internacional Verde?

R: No se ha hecho porque los ecologistas pensaban que la Tierra iba a unificar todos estos movimientos. Han surgido un montón de redes, basadas en casos concretos, como Greenpeace. Hay asociaciones, pero nada a nivel político. La internacional sigue siendo la geopolítica clásica de los Estados nación. No ha habido reflexión sobre la nueva situación. Existe una ecología profunda, deep ecology, en Francia prácticamente inexistente, que ha tenido un papel importante en Alemania, en los países escandinavos y en Norteamérica. Pero está muy poco politizada.

P: Estamos ante un fracaso político y ante una mayor conciencia de los científicos. ¿Y los ciudadanos?

R: Paradójicamente, esa dolorosa pelea sobre el clima nos ha permitido progresar. En cierto modo, la querella ha tenido un papel importante en una “comprensión renovada” por parte del público de la realidad científica. El problema es que intentamos insertar las cuestiones ecológicas en el viejo modelo “ciencia y política”. Desde este punto de vista, incluso los científicos más avanzados siguen intentando poner estas cuestiones dentro del marco de esa situación superada que intento criticar. Este es el tema del libro, y en ese sentido sigue de actualidad.

P: En Francia hay una identificación entre ecologismo y territorio. José Bové, por ejemplo, es un proteccionista a ultranza. Es rara esta evolución de la ecología hacia el nacionalismo, ¿no?

R: Sí, pero al mismo tiempo es útil e interesante replantearse lo que es el territorio, el terruño, por usar la palabra francesa. Los ecologistas siempre se han mostrado indecisos sobre el carácter progresista o reaccionario de su apego a la tierra, porque la expresión en francés puede significar cosas muy distintas. Pero es importante, porque es una de las dimensiones de la cuestión ecológica, tanto de la progresista como de la arcaica. Ese era uno de los objetivos fundamentales del libro, saber si hemos sido realmente modernos alguna vez. Hay aspectos regresivos en el apego al terruño, y a la vez hay otros muy importantes sobre la definición de los límites, de los entornos en los cuales vivimos, que son decisivos para el porvenir. Una vez más, los verdes han omitido trabajar esa cuestión. Pero el problema de la orientación, de la diferencia entre el apego reaccionario o progresista a la tierra, es fundamental. Si vemos movimientos como Slow Food, nos preguntamos si están adelantados o retrasados, porque tienen aspectos regresivos. Pero si se piensa en el tema de los circuitos de distribución, ¿por qué las lasañas inglesas tendrían que estar hechas con caballo rumano y transitar por 25 intermediarios? No es una tontería: si tomamos caballo francés, rumano o turco, las cuestiones de pertenencia y de límites se convierten en cuestiones progresistas.

El antropólogo iconoclasta

Bruno Latour nació en la Borgoña, donde surgen los vinos más caros del planeta. Su padre era viticultor. De ahí sus pecualiares análisis sobre el terruño y la tradición. Cursó Antropología y Sociología. Su formación es tan variopinta como los centros donde ha impartido clase, desde la Escuela de Minas de París hasta la London School of Economics y la cátedra de Historia de Harvard.

Escritor incansable, es autor de una treintena de libros de ensayo, todos los últimos editados por Harvard, por los que circulan la tierra, la sociedad, la guerra, la energía, la ciencia, la tecnología, la modernidad y los medios de comunicación.

Su último proyecto está conectado con el llamado medialab, un espacio donde desarrollar conexiones entre las tecnologías digitales, la sociología y los estudios científicos.

P: Su libro llama a superar los esquemas de izquierda y derecha. Pero no parece que eso haya cambiado mucho.

R: El debate afronta un gran problema. Hay una inversión de las relaciones entre el marco geográfico y la política: el marco ha cambiado mucho más que la política. Las grandes negociaciones internacionales manifiestan esa inercia de la organización económica, legal y política, mientras que el marco, lo que antes llamábamos la Tierra, la geografía, cambia a velocidad asombrosa. Esa mutación es difícil de comprender por la gente acostumbrada a la historia de antes, en la cual había humanos que se peleaban, como en el siglo XX: hombres haciéndose la guerra dentro de un marco geográfico estable desde la última glaciación. Es una razón demasiado filosófica. Así que preferimos pensar que tenemos tiempo, que todo está en su sitio, que la economía es así, que el derecho internacional es así, etcétera. Pero incluso los términos para señalar las aceleraciones rápidas han cambiado, volcándose hacia la naturaleza y los glaciares. El tiempo que vivimos es el del antropoceno, y las cosas ya no son como antes. Lo que ha cambiado desde que escribí el libro es que en aquel momento no teníamos la noción del antropoceno. Fue una invención muy útil de Crutzen, un climatólogo, pero no existía entonces, me habría ayudado mucho.

P: ¿Y qué fue de su propuesta de aprobar una constitución ecológica?

R: Intenté construir una asociación de parlamentarios y lanzar una constitución para que las cuestiones de la energía empezaran a ser tratadas de otro modo. Intentaba abrir un debate, que naturalmente no ha tenido lugar. El debate sobre la Constitución empezó bien, se consideró una gran invención de la democracia europea. El problema es que ya no se trata de la cuestión de la representación de los humanos, sino que ese debate atañe a los innumerables seres que viven en la Tierra. Me parecía necesario en aquel momento, y ahora más incluso, hacer un debate constitucional. ¿Cómo sería un Parlamento dedicado a la política ecológica? Tendrá que crearse, pero no reflexionamos lo suficiente sobre las cuestiones de fondo.

P: ¿Las grandes conferencias medioambientales resuelven algo?

R: El problema es que la geopolítica organizada en torno a una nación, con sus propios intereses y nivel de agregación, está mal adaptada a las cuestiones ecológicas, que son transnacionales. Todo el mundo sabe eso, los avances no pueden plasmarse ya a base de mapas, no jugamos en territorios clásicos. Así, desde Copenhague 2009 hay una desafección por las grandes cumbres, no solo porque no se consigue decidir nada, sino también porque nos damos cuenta de que el nivel de decisión y agregación política no es el correcto. De hecho, las ciudades, las regiones, las naciones, las provincias, toman a menudo más iniciativas que los Estados.

P: Francia es uno de los países más nuclearizados del mundo. Los ecologistas braman. ¿Le parece bien?

R: Los ecologistas se han obstinado en la cuestión nuclear, pero nadie ha venido a explicarnos por qué lo nuclear es antiecológico, mientras mucha gente seria considera que el átomo es una de las soluciones, a largo plazo no, pero a corto plazo sí. De nuevo estamos ante la ausencia total de reflexión política por parte de los ecologistas, que militan contra lo nuclear sin explicar por qué. Por consiguiente, no hemos avanzado un centímetro. De hecho, en este momento hay un gran debate público sobre la transición energética, y los verdes siguen siendo incapaces de comprender nada, incluso de discutir, porque han moralizado la cuestión nuclear. Cuando se hace ética, no hay que hacer política, hay que hacer religión.

P: ¿Está realmente en cuestión la supervivencia de la especie?

R: La especie humana se las apañará. Nadie piensa que vaya a desaparecer, ¿pero la civilización? No se sabe lo que es una Tierra a seis u ocho grados, no lo hemos conocido. Hay que remontarse centenares de millones de años. El problema no se abordaba con la misma urgencia cuando escribí el libro en 1999, se hablaba aún de las generaciones futuras. Ahora hablamos de nuestros hijos. No hay una sola empresa que haga un cálculo más allá de 2050, es el horizonte más corto que ha habido nunca. La mutación de la historia es increíblemente rápida. Ahora se trata de acontecimientos naturales, mucho más rápidos que los humanos. Es inimaginable para la gente formada en el siglo XX, una novedad total.

P: ¿Es la globalización? ¿O más que eso?

R: Tiene relación con la globalización, pero no por la extensión de las conexiones entre los humanos. Se trata de la llegada de un mundo desagradable que impide la globalización real: es un conflicto entre globos. Nos hemos globalizado, y eso resulta tranquilizador porque todo está conectado y hace de la Tierra un planeta pequeño. Pero que un gran pueblo sea aplastado al chocar con otra cosa tranquiliza menos.

La especie humana se las apañará. nadie piensa que va a desaparecer”

P: ¿Y el malestar que sentimos, la indignación, tiene que ver con ese miedo?

R: Ese catastrofismo siempre ha existido; siempre ha habido momentos de apocalipsis, de literatura de la catástrofe; pero al mismo tiempo existe un sentimiento nuevo: no se trata del apocalipsis de los humanos, sino del final de recursos, en un sentido, creo, literal.

P: ¿Nos hemos zampado el planeta?

R: La gente que analiza el antropoceno dibuja esquemas de este tipo (muestra un famoso gráfico de población y recursos). Esto se llama “la gran aceleración”, ocurrió en 1947. La revolución ya ha tenido lugar, y es una de las causas de esa nueva ansiedad. La gente sigue hablando de la revolución, desesperándose porque no llega, pero ya está aquí. Es un acontecimiento pasado y de consecuencias catastróficas. Eso también nubla la mente de progresistas y reaccionarios. ¿Qué significa vivir en una época en la cual la revolución ha ocurrido ya y cuyos resultados son catastróficos?

P: ¿No querrá decir que la austeridad es la solución?

R: Ya existe el concepto del decrecimiento feliz, no sé si la tienen en España… ¡Sí! Ustedes están muy adelantados sobre decrecimiento.

P: Estamos en plena vanguardia, pero del infeliz.

R: Es uno de los grandes temas del momento, la crisis económica es decrecimiento no deseado, desigualmente repartido; y hay algo más: austeridad no es necesariamente la palabra, sino ascetismo. Sería la visión religiosa, o espiritual, de la austeridad. Eso se mezcla con las nuevas visiones geológicas de los límites que debemos imponernos…

P: ¿Habla del regreso al campo o de reconstruir el planeta?

R: No me refiero a volver al campo, sino a otra Tierra.

P: ¿La tecnología es la única brújula?

R: La tecnología se encuentra en esa misma situación. Existe una solución muy importante de la geoingeniería, que considera que la situación es reversible, que se pueden recrear artificialmente unas condiciones favorables tras haberlas destruido sin saberlo. Así ha surgido un inmenso movimiento de geoingeniería en todas partes. Ya que es la energía de la Tierra, podemos mandar naves espaciales, modificar la acidez de las aguas del mar, etcétera. Hacer algo que contrarreste lo que se hizo mal. Si hemos podido modificar la Tierra, podemos modificarla en el otro sentido, lo que es un argumento peligroso, porque la podemos destrozar por segunda vez.

P: ¿No se regenerará sola?

R: Sí, ¡pero sin humanos! Se regenerará sola mientras no haya humanos. Puede deshacerse de nosotros, es una de las hipótesis, volviéndose invivible, pero eso no sería muy positivo. La era de los límites puede llegar hasta la extinción.

P: ¿Acabaremos fatal?

R: La historia no está repleta de ejemplos favorables. No se sabe. No hay nada en la naturaleza humana que favorezca la reflexión, por lo cual la solución solo puede ser mala.

P: Algunos temen que acabaremos devorados por los chinos.

R: Los chinos tienen más problemas que nosotros y corren el peligro de comerse a sí mismos por el suelo, el agua y el aire. No nos amenazan, desaparecerán antes que nosotros.

P: Žižek dice que nuestros problemas provienen de la mediocridad intelectual de Alemania y Francia, que esa es la razón principal de la decadencia actual. ¿Qué piensa?

R: Es una estupidez. Ocurren muchas más cosas intelectualmente en Europa que en América, infinitamente más. Por ejemplo, en arte, en filosofía, en ciencias, en urbanismo. Es insensato decir cosas así, pero es que Žižek es un viejo cretino, una especie de cosa de extrema izquierda, fruto del agotamiento de la extrema izquierda, de su decadencia final, de la cual es el síntoma. Por otra parte, es un chico muy majo. La extrema izquierda se ha equivocado tanto sobre el mundo que al final todos estos viejos de extrema izquierda no tienen otra cosa que hacer salvo vomitar sobre el mundo, como hace Alain Badiou en Francia.

P: ¿Prefiere a Marine Le Pen?

R: No soy político, no puedo responder a esta pregunta, no me interesa.

P: ¿No le gusta hablar de política?

R: Sí hablo de política, he escrito un libro sobre política, ¡que yo sepa!,Las políticas de la naturaleza.

P: ¿No le interesa la política de todos los días?

R: La de todos los días sí, pero no la de los partidos, son agitaciones superficiales, sobre todo en Francia, donde ya no hay verdaderamente política.

P: Critica a la extrema izquierda, ¿y nada a la extrema derecha?

R: Se agita, intenta agarrarse a un clavo ardiendo, pero no tiene mucha importancia. No es ahí donde las cosas están en juego.

P: ¿Cree que es residual?

R: No, no es residual, puede desarrollarse y provocar daños, tanto como la extrema izquierda; el no pensar siempre provoca daños, pero no es eso lo que va a solucionar los problemas de la Tierra, la economía, las ciudades, el transporte y la tecnología.

P: ¿Qué escenario prevé para 2050? ¿Qué Tierra, qué humanidad?

R: Ese no es mi trabajo, mi trabajo consiste en prepararnos para las guerras. Las guerras ecológicas van a ser muy importantes y tenemos que preparar nuestros ejércitos de un modo intelectual y humano. Ese es mi trabajo.

P: ¿Habrá guerras violentas por el clima?

R: La definición misma de guerra va a cambiar, estamos en una situación en la cual no podemos ganar contra la Tierra, es una guerra asimétrica: si ganamos, perdemos, y si perdemos, ganamos. Así pues, esta situación crea obligaciones a multitud de gente y antes que nada a los intelectuales.

P: ¿La batalla principal es esa?

R: Si no tenemos mundo, no podemos hacer gran cosa, ni siquiera la revolución. Cuando se lee a Marx, uno se queda impresionado por lo que dice sobre los humanos. En esta época, la cuestión de la ciencia y del margen geográfico, más la presencia de miles de millones de personas, conforma un escenario crucial. Antes teníamos otros problemas, pero este no.

P: ¿Así que se trata de ser o no ser?

R: En cada informe científico, las previsiones son peores, el plan más pesimista siempre aparece. Hay que tener en cuenta eso. Son previsiones extremas, pero de momento son las únicas válidas. No se trata de una guerra mundial, sino de una acumulación de guerras mundiales. Es parecido al invierno nuclear de la guerra fría, una situación de cataclismo, pero con algunas ventajas: es más radical, pero más lento, tenemos mucha capacidad de invención, 9.000 millones de personas y muchas mentes inteligentes. Pero también es un reto. Por tanto, es una cuestión de alta política y no de naturaleza. La política viene primero.

P: ¿Tiene la sensación de estar solo?

R: Lo que era complicado en este libro era crear el vínculo entre ciencia y política, y no puedo decir que haya convencido a mucha gente. Si además se hace el vínculo entre la religión y las artes, es más difícil. Gente como Sloterdijk sería muy capaz de comprenderlo. Sin embargo, muchos intelectuales siguen en el siglo XX, como Žižek. Permanecen en un contexto, en un ideal revolucionario, de decepción. Están decepcionados con los humanos.

P: ¿Cree que los humanos se dejarán ayudar?

R: Primero hay que ayudar a la Tierra. En el antropoceno ya no se puede hacer la distinción entre los humanos y la Tierra.

P: ¿Y sus estudiantes están listos para la lucha?

R: En mi escuela soy el único en dar clases sobre cuestiones donde no entra la política en el sentido clásico. Hay un curso o dos sobre cuestiones ecológicas. Es culpa mía, no he trabajado lo suficiente como para cambiar las cosas. Llevamos mucho retraso.

O episódio Marco Feliciano, o Congresso e as manifestações populares

27/03/2013UncategorizedBancada evangélica, Cidadania, Congresso Nacional, Discriminação, Marco Feliciano, Política, Redes sociais, sociedade civilrenzotaddei

Guilherme Karakida, da UFRJ Plural, me entrevistou ontem, poucas horas antes do anúncio, por parte do PSC, de que Marco Feliciano permaneceria na presidência da CDHM. Reproduzo a entrevista abaixo – Renzo Taddei.

Por Guilherme Karakida – 26 de março de 2013

O que significa, do ponto de vista político, a presidência do Marco Feliciano na Comissão dos Direitos Humanos e Minorias(CDHM)?

Essa não é uma questão simples. Há vários fatores distintos que marcam o momento político atual brasileiro, e que se cruzam no caso do Marco Feliciano. Vou mencionar alguns que acho mais importantes, do meu ponto de vista. E o meu ponto de vista é o de alguém mais próximo aos movimentos sociais e não de um especialista no funcionamento do legislativo. É importante deixar claro a partir de onde se está falando. Se o Marco Feliciano tem uma virtude que muitos outros congressistas não têm, é o fato de ele não esconder quem ele é.

Em primeiro lugar, há a estratégia de amplas alianças partidárias como forma de chegar ao poder e se manter nele, usada pelo PT desde meados da década de 1990. Isso não é marca exclusiva do PT: em ciência política, se diz que o Brasil tem como sistema político um presidencialismo de coalizão. Isso significa que os partidos necessitam criar coalisões para ter sucesso eleitoral, e os presidentes da república precisam delas para governar, especialmente no que diz respeito às formas como a presidência se relaciona com o Congresso Nacional. O que ocorre é que, no caso da era PT, há partidos na base aliada que são marcadamente conservadores. Ou seja, aquela ideia antiga que diz que o governo do PT é de esquerda e a oposição é de direita não condiz com a realidade. O PT se relaciona melhor com partidos de centro-direita do que com partidos de esquerda, como o PSTU e o PSOL. É nesse contexto que o PSC passa a fazer parte da ampla coligação de partidos em apoio à candidatura de Dilma Roussef em 2010. Marco Feliciano foi cabo eleitoral importante de Dilma dentro do mundo evangélico. Com o consequente loteamento de cargos dentro das várias instâncias do governo, inclusive no legislativo, era de se esperar que Marco Feliciano assumisse alguma posição de liderança.

Em segundo lugar há o avanço da bancada evangélica no universo da política, de forma crescente, nos últimos anos. Há, entre lideranças políticas evangélicas, a agenda declarada de ocupar todos os cargos possíveis, com o intuito de barrar a aprovação de legislação que vá contra os preceitos morais que defendem. O próprio Marco Feliciano diz abertamente que está lá para barrar a aprovação do PL 122, o projeto de lei que criminaliza a homofobia.

E, finalmente, há o descaso do governo Dilma para com as questões dos direitos humanos e das minorias. Apesar de o governo Dilma ter sinalizado,no início de sua gestão, em direção favorável no que diz respeito a esses temas, com a criação da Comissão da Verdade e com a valorização da questão de gênero na composição do governo, e também com a manutenção do movimento pró-cotas que herdou do governo Lula, o que viria depois iria demonstrar que aquelas eram iniciativas de certa forma pontuais, e que não constituiriam uma linha de ação perene. Em virtude de uma série de conflitos com grande parte dos movimentos sociais, por razões que vão do descaso e desrespeito às populações chamadas tradicionais, como os indígenas, ao retrocesso quanto às políticas culturais da gestão anterior, onde havia a compreensão de que o direito à própria cultura é uma forma de direito humano, o governo Dilma enfrenta a oposição massiva das organizações da sociedade civil – pelo menos daquelas que não foram cooptadas pelo governo e passaram a depender de verba federal para existir. De certa forma, o governo Dilma reduz o tema dos direitos humanos, como todos os demais problemas sociais, à questão da renda, pura e simplesmente. O governo Dilma foi criticado pela Anistia Internacional e pelo HumanRightsWatch, apenas para mencionar duas entidades importantes na área. É esse descaso que fez com que a Comissão dos Direitos Humanos e Minorias não fosse prioridade das lideranças governistas no legislativo, e esta se tornou alvo fácil da bancada evangélica.

Como um parlamentar que deu declarações homofóbicas e racistas pode assumir um órgão que luta justamente pela garantia e manutenção dos direitos humanos desses grupos?

Trata-se de uma estratégia política, fundamentada na agenda específica da bancada evangélica, e não na compreensão que o senso comum tem do que são os direitos humanos e as minorias. Ou seja, é óbvio que Marco Feliciano não está lá para avançar na questão dos direitos humanos e das minorias, da forma como estas pautas se constituem historicamente no Brasil; pelo contrário, ele está lá para evitar que qualquer avanço nessa área se dê de forma conflitante com a agenda moralizante da bancada à qual ele faz parte. No Brasil, os temas dos direitos humanos e das minorias são historicamente parte das agendas políticas da esquerda; a direita sempre defendeu a supressão desses temas dos debates nacionais, como ainda se pode ver dentro dos meios militares, por exemplo. O que ocorre é que é a direita religiosa, e não a direita histórica, formada por militares e ruralistas, por exemplo, e com a qual a esquerda sempre esteve mais acostumada, começou a ocupar cargos importantes. E, o que é mais problemático, o faz de dentro mesmo do governo, como parte da base aliada.

É preciso que se diga, no entanto, que a bancada evangélica é notoriamente fragmentada em questões políticas, convergindo apenas em questões ligadasas decorrência políticas de sua fé, como nos temas do casamento entre pessoas do mesmo sexo e aborto. Nesse contexto, Marco Feliciano é particularmente patético e espalhafatoso, a ponto de uma grande quantidade de pastores evangélicos no país terem aderido à campanha “Marco Feliciano não me representa”. Ou seja, ele se transformou num abacaxi até mesmo para parte importante do universo evangélico.

Um aspecto disso que passa despercebido da maioria dos debates é o fato de que há o risco de que se reforcem os preconceitos de classe associados à população evangélica, tipicamente proveniente de camadas populares. Ou seja, dentro do contexto de ascensão conservadora em lugares como a cidade de São Paulo, tema de debate recente na USP, há o potencial de que o ressentimento da classe média dita “tradicional” para com as populações favorecidas pelos programas sociais das últimas duas décadas se dê na forma de recrudescimento de preconceitos religiosos.

A presidência do CDHM por um sujeito como o parlamentar do PSC reflete o cenário político brasileiro, no qual os absurdos se repetem?

Sem dúvida, e o uso do termo absurdo ilustra outra dimensão do problema: a crise de legitimidade do Estado atinge agora níveis estratosféricos. Particularmente no parlamento, com Renan Calheiros na presidência do Senado, Marco Feliciano na Comissão dos Direitos Humanos e Minorias – e esses são apenas os exemplos do momento -, as duas casas são marcadas porum nível de descrédito talvez inédito. Ou seja, a população vive a velha sensação de desconexão com o parlamento de forma inflacionada, em parte porque tanto Renan Calheiros quanto Marco Feliciano e alguns de seus apoiadores, como o Jair Bolsonaro, dão performances públicas profundamente desrespeitosas à população brasileira.

Por outro lado, há um aspecto positivo nisso tudo: tenho a impressão de que essa controvérsia toda, somada a outros conflitos como o de Belo Monte, o dos Guarani Kaiowá do Mato Grosso do Sul, o da Aldeia Maracanã e demais remoções desumanas ocorridas no Rio de Janeiro em função dos chamados grandes eventos, esta inserindo um bocado de gente jovem no mundo da política, repolitizando gente não tão jovem assim, e quebrando a ideia de que a população só pode se relacionar com a política através de partidos políticos e das eleições. Frequentemente escuto alguém dizer “mas ele foi eleito,e não há nada que se possa fazer a esse respeito”. Isso é discurso de quem não tem interesse na efetiva participação popular na política desse país. A democracia participativa é mais democrática que a representativa; manifestações populares nas ruas e petições públicas são coisas que fortalecem a democracia. E há iniciativas ligadas à democracia participativa ocorrendo em diversas partes do mundo. O sociólogo espanhol Manuel Castells tem escrito sobre a iniciativa chamada Partido do Futuro naquele país; no Brasil, articula-se o #rede. Em ambos os casos, um dos objetivos centrais é a valorização e o fortalecimento de ações políticas existentes fora das instituições tradicionais de poder.

É de se esperar, naturalmente, que aslideranças ligadas ao status quo tendam a ser conservadoras, e se esforcem para diminuir a importância das manifestações populares: em todos os poderes iremos escutar que não se pode administrar um país em função do clamor que vem das ruas, sob o risco de se deixar levar por sentimentalismos de momento e, assim, fragilizar as instituições e o Estado. Não se pode discutir a redução da maioridade penal ou a pena de morte com base no sensacionalismo da mídia; obviamente existe lógica no argumento. O problema é que ele é frequentemente usado para desarticular movimentos políticos legítimos – Renan Calheiros usou esse argumento para justificar a razão pela qual não deixaria a presidência do Senado. O resultado disso tudo é a sensação de que o custo da estabilidade institucional do parlamento é a sua falência moral. O ponto é justamente esse: para grande parte da população brasileira, as instituições de poder estão moralmente falidas, e as ações de membros da base aliada, como Renan Calheiros e Marco Feliciano, sem que as principais lideranças se manifestem a esse respeito, não fazem mais do que evidenciar isso de forma contundente.

O parlamentar já se defendeu publicamente e pediu um “voto de confiança” da população. Nesse caso, e com a repercussão que o assunto alcançou, isso é possível?

Marco Feliciano não vai mudar sua linha de ação. Talvez modere o seu discurso, mas não vai mudar de agenda. Mesmo após o movimento que exige sua renúncia tomar as proporções que tomou, ele afirmou recentemente à revista Veja que a população LGBT não constitui minoria; na tentativa de dizer que os negros não são amaldiçoados, ele simplesmente repetiu o argumento original e, portanto, a calúnia, e pateticamente adicionou “Eu não disse que os africanos são todos amaldiçoados. Até porque o continente africano é grande demais. Não tem só negros. A África do Sul tem brancos”.

Não estou dizendo, com isso, que não há lugar no parlamento para ele. Isso seria profundamente antidemocrático. É natural que exista a bancada evangélica, e ela deve ser respeitada. O que é um contrassenso é ter um líder de comissão cuja agenda é impedir que a comissão funcione, como é claramente o caso de Marco Feliciano.

O que pode vir a ocorrer caso o deputado permaneça no cargo?

Infelizmente nem a Dilma nem o PT, insulados que estão no jogo do poder, tem preocupação com o que pensam a sociedade civil e os movimentos sociais. A cada pesquisa de opinião que mostra os níveis elevados de popularidade da presidenta, menos interesse ela tem em dialogar com os atores ativos da sociedade civil. Daí o mutismo presidencial no que diz respeito a esse imbróglio político. O que ocorre, no entanto, é que nunca no Brasil o movimento LGBT, por exemplo, foi tão organizado e ativo; o mesmo pode se dizer de grupos que atuam em defesa de populações indígenas, muitas das quais veem na atividade missionária evangélica uma ameaça real à sua existência cultural. Não acredito que possa haver qualquer forma de acomodação quanto à presença de Marco Feliciano na presidência da Comissão dos Direitos Humanos e Minorias. Marco Feliciano provavelmente irá bloquear a discussão de pontos importantes da agenda de alguns movimentos, notadamente o LGBT, o que sem dúvida irá manter a briga acirrada.

As manifestações tanto nas redes sociais como nas ruas podem contribuir de que maneira para sua saída?

Cabe à sociedade civil transformar essa questão em algo que cause desgaste político a Dilma e ao PSC; ou seja, é hora de fazer barulho.Nesse exato momento, o PSC examina o custo político de deixar as coisas como estão, porque sentiu o efeito da mobilização popular. Não há qualquer dúvida de que foram as redes sociais, nesse caso, como na coleta de mais de um milhão e seiscentas mil assinaturas na petição em favor da renúncia de Renan Calheiros, ou no apoio aos Guarani Kaiowá ou à Aldeia Maracanã, que fizeram toda a diferença.

As redes sociais tem papel fundamental na circulação de informações que não figuram na mídia tradicional, ou pela possibilidade de enquadramentos diversos àqueles que caracterizam as grandes corporações de imprensa desse país. Além disso, a própria forma como as informações existem nas redes sociais são um diferencial enorme: boa parte delas circula como dado, como declaração de apoio à causa e como convocação à ação, tudo isso ao mesmo tempo. Quebra-se assim a falsidade ideológica característica do discurso supostamente neutro da imprensa corporativa. Há também o risco de que a mobilização política nas redes ganhe um caráter de linchamento cibernético, como tem reclamado o próprio Marco Feliciano; infelizmente os movimentos sociais não sabem como lidar com esse problema, que é real.

O fato é que vivemos um momento de transformação dos processos políticos, em especial no que diz respeito à relação destes com as tecnologias digitais. Ninguém sabe exatamente como se dá a relação entre redes sociais e a política, porque não temos muita experiência a esse respeito, tudo é muito novo, ainda estamos engatinhando nesse sentido. Mas já pudemos ver o potencial existente nessa articulação. E é exatamente por isso que vivemos um momento excepcional: estou certo de que 2014 será um ano de enormes surpresas. Espero que aí se inicie um processo através do qual muitos dos paleopolíticos que infestam Brasília sejam extintos; mas só esperando pra ver. Só não podemos esperar sentados: para que isso efetivamente ocorra, é preciso acreditar que a política das ruas e dos teclados é tão, senão mais, importante que a das instituições centrais do poder.

A política do futuro já chegou (Revista Fórum)

26/03/2013UncategorizedCidadania, Espanha, Incerteza, participatividade, Partidos políticos, Política, Redes sociais, sociedade civilrenzotaddei

25/03/2013 9:12 pm

Uma iniciativa popular na Espanha propõe exercer a democracia direta. A ideia se disseminou na internet e evidenciou a crise institucional do país, e também, a necessidade de outro sistema de representação.

Por Manuel Castells*

No dia 8 de janeiro foi anunciada, na internet, a criação do “partido do futuro”, um método experimental para construir uma democracia sem intermediários, que substituiria as atuais instituições deslegitimadas na mente dos cidadãos. A repercussão social e midiática tem sido considerável. Apenas no primeiro dia de lançamento, apesar do colapso do servidor ao receber 600 petições por segundo, foram 13 mil seguidores no twitter, 7 mil no Facebook e 100 mil visitas no Youtube. Mídias estrangeiras e espanholas têm repercutido o futuro que anuncia o triunfo eleitoral de seu programa: democracia e ponto. (http://partidodelfuturo.net).

Movimento 15-M em Madri: nova política (Foto: Wikimedia Commons)

Sinal de que já não se pode ignorar o que surge do 15-M (nascimento do movimento dos indignados). Porque este partido emerge do caldo criado pelo movimento, embora de forma alguma se equipare ao mesmo. Porque não há “o movimento” com estrutura organizada, nem representantes, e sim pessoas em movimento que compartilham de uma denúncia básica das formas de representação política que tem deixado pessoas indefesas diante dos efeitos de uma crise que não foram culpadas, porém sofrem os resultados a cada dia. O 15-M é uma prática coletiva e individual diversificada e de mudanças, que vive na rede e nas ruas, e cujos componentes tomam iniciativas de todo o tipo, desde a defesa contra o escândalo das hipotecas até a proposta de lei eleitoral que democratize a política.

Porém, até agora, muitas destas iniciativas parecem condenadas a um beco sem saída. Por um lado, as pesquisas mostram que uma grande maioria dos cidadãos (cerca de 70%) concorda com a crítica do 15-M e com muitas de suas propostas. Por outro lado, toda esta mobilização não se traduz em medidas concretas que aliviem as pessoas, pois há um bloqueio institucional para a adoção destas propostas. Os dois grandes partidos espanhóis são corresponsáveis pela submissão da política aos poderes financeiros no tratamento da crise, compartilhando, por exemplo, a gestão irresponsável dos diretores do Banco da Espanha, com um governador socialista, no caso de Bankia e do sistema de caixas, que tem conduzido a ruína milhares de famílias. Por isso, o 15-M se expressou no espaço público, em acampamentos, manifestações, assembleias de bairro e em ações pontuais de denúncia. Mas, embora esta intervenção seja essencial para criar consciência, se esgota em si mesma quando se confronta com uma repressão policial cada vez mais violenta.

Felizmente, o 15-M tem freado qualquer impulso de protesto violento, e tem feito um papel de canalizador pacífico da ira popular. O dilema é como superar as barreiras atuais sem deixar de ser um movimento espontâneo, auto-organizado, com múltiplas iniciativas que não são um programa. E por isso, podem unir potencialmente os 99% que sabem o que não querem, e que concordam em buscar um conjunto de novas vias políticas de gestão pela vida.

Para avançar nesse sentido, tem surgido uma iniciativa espontânea de ocupar o único espaço em que o movimento é pouco presente: as instituições. Mas não imediatamente, porque seu projeto não é ser uma minoria parlamentar, e sim de modificar a forma de fazer política, mediante uma democracia direta, instrumentada na internet, propondo referendos sobre temas-chaves, elaborando propostas legislativas mediante consultas e debates no espaço público, urbano e cibernético, implantando medidas concretas de debates entre os cidadãos e utilizando a plataforma com propostas que saiam do povo.

Na realidade, não é um partido, embora esteja inscrito no registro dos partidos, mas sim um experimento político, que vai se reinventando conforme avança. No horizonte vislumbra-se um momento em que o apoio do povo para votar contra todos os políticos de uma vez e em favor de uma plataforma eleitoral que tenha como único ponto no programa, permitir uma ocupação legal do parlamento e o desmantelamento do sistema tradicional de representação por dentro dele mesmo. Não é tão descabido. É muito o que aconteceu na Islândia, referência explicita do partido do futuro.

Mas, como evitar reproduzir o esquema de partido no processo de conquistar a maioria eleitoral? Aqui é onde surge a decisão, criticada pela classe política e alguns meios, das pessoas que têm tomado esta iniciativa de manter-se no anonimato. Porque se não há nomes, não há lideres, nem cargos, nem comitês federais, nem porta-vozes que dizem falar pelos demais, mas que acabam representando a si mesmos. Se não há rostos, o que sobra são ideias, práticas, iniciativas. De fato, é a prática da máscara como forma de criação de um sujeito coletivo composto de milhões de indivíduos mascarados, como fizeram os zapatistas, ou como fazem os Anonymous com a sua famosa máscara reconhecida em todo o mundo, mas com múltiplos portadores. Inclusive o anonimato do protesto se encontra em nossos clássicos: “Fuenteovejuna todos a una”.

Talvez chegue o momento em que as listas eleitorais queiram nomes, mas não necessariamente serão líderes, porque poderão ser sorteados os nomes entre milhares de pessoas que estejam de acordo com uma plataforma de ideias. No fundo se trata de pôr em primeiro plano a política das ideias com a que os políticos enchem a boca, enquanto fazem sua carreira entre cotoveladas. A personalização da política é maior sequela da liderança ao longo da história, baseada na demagogia, na ditadura do chefe e na política do escândalo para destruir pessoas representativas. O X do partido do futuro não é para esconder-se, mas sim para que seu conteúdo preencha as pessoas que projetem neste experimento seus sonhos pessoais em um sonho coletivo: democracia e ponto. A definir.

*Tradução: Carolina Rovai. Artigo publicado originalmente no La Vanguardia

Germany Has Created An Accidental Empire (Social Europe)

26/03/2013UncategorizedColonialismo, Economia, Europa, Incerteza, Política, Políticas públicas, Previsãorenzotaddei

25/03/2013 BY ULRICH BECK

Are we now living in a German Europe? In an interview with EUROPP editors Stuart A Brown and Chris Gilson, Ulrich Beck discusses German dominance of the European Union, the divisive effects of austerity policies, and the relevance of his concept of the ‘risk society’ to the current problems being experienced in the Eurozone.

How has Germany come to dominate the European Union?

Well it happened somehow by accident. Germany has actually created an ‘accidental empire’. There is no master plan; no intention to occupy Europe. It doesn’t have a military basis, so all the talk about a ‘Fourth Reich’ is misplaced. Rather it has an economic basis – it’s about economic power – and it’s interesting to see how in the anticipation of a European catastrophe, with fears that the Eurozone and maybe even the European Union might break down, the landscape of power in Europe has changed fundamentally.

First of all there’s a split between the Eurozone countries and the non-Eurozone countries. Suddenly for example the UK, which is only a member of the EU and not a member of the Eurozone, is losing its veto power. It’s a tragic comedy how the British Prime Minister is trying to tell us that he is still the one who is in charge of changing the European situation. The second split is that among the Eurozone countries there is an important division of power between the lender countries and the debtor countries. As a result Germany, the strongest economic country, has become the most powerful EU state.

Are austerity policies dividing Europe?

Indeed they are, in many ways. First of all we have a new line of division between northern European and southern European countries. Of course this is very evident, but the background from a sociological point of view is that we are experiencing the redistribution of risk from the banks, through the states, to the poor, the unemployed and the elderly. This is an amazing new inequality, but we are still thinking in national terms and trying to locate this redistribution of risk in terms of national categories.

At the same time there are two leading ideologies in relation to austerity policies. The first is pretty much based on what I call the ‘Merkiavelli’ model – by this I mean a combination of Niccolò Machiavelli and Angela Merkel. On a personal level, Merkel takes a long time to make decisions: she’s always waiting until some kind of consensus appears. But this kind of waiting makes the countries depending on Germany’s decision realise that actually Germany holds the power. This deliberate hesitation is quite an interesting strategy in terms of the way that Germany has taken over economically.

The second element is that Germany’s austerity policies are not based simply on pragmatism, but also underlying values. The German objection to countries spending more money than they have is a moral issue which, from a sociological point of view, ties in with the ‘Protestant Ethic’. It’s a perspective which has Martin Luther and Max Weber in the background. But this is not seen as a moral issue in Germany, instead it’s viewed as economic rationality. They don’t see it as a German way of resolving the crisis; they see it as if they are the teachers instructing southern European countries on how to manage their economies.

This creates another ideological split because the strategy doesn’t seem to be working so far and we see many forms of protest, of which Cyprus is the latest example. But on the other hand there is still a very important and powerful neo-liberal faction in Europe which continues to believe that austerity policies are the answer to the crisis.

Is the Eurozone crisis proof that we live in a risk society?

Yes, this is the way I see it. My idea of the risk society could easily be misunderstood because the term ‘risk’ actually signifies that we are in a situation to cope with uncertainty, but to me the risk society is a situation in which we are not able to cope with the uncertainty and consequences that we produce in society.

I make a distinction between ‘first modernity’ and our current situation. First modernity, which lasted from around the 18^th century until perhaps the 1960s or 1970s, was a period where there was a great deal of space for experimentation and we had a lot of answers for the uncertainties that we produced: probability models, insurance mechanisms, and so on. But then because of the success of modernity we are now producing consequences for which we don’t have any answers, such as climate change and the financial crisis. The financial crisis is an example of the victory of a specific interpretation of modernity: neo-liberal modernity after the breakdown of the Communist system, which dictates that the market is the solution and that the more we increase the role of the market, the better. But now we see that this model is failing and we don’t have any answers.

We have to make a distinction between a risk society and a catastrophe society. A catastrophe society would be one in which the motto is ‘too late’: where we give in to the panic of desperation. A risk society in contrast is about the anticipation of future catastrophes in order to prevent them from happening. But because these potential catastrophes are not supposed to happen – the financial system could collapse, or nuclear technology could be a threat to the whole world – we don’t have the basis for experimentation. The rationality of calculating risk doesn’t work anymore. We are trying to anticipate something that is not supposed to happen, which is an entirely new situation.

Take Germany as an example. If we look at Angela Merkel, a few years ago she didn’t believe that Greece posed a major problem, or that she needed to engage with it as an issue. Yet now we are in a completely different situation because she has learned that if you look into the eyes of a potential catastrophe, suddenly new things become possible. Suddenly you think about new institutions, or about the fiscal compact, or about a banking union, because you anticipate a catastrophe which is not supposed to happen. This is a huge mobilising force, but it’s highly ambivalent because it can be used in different ways. It could be used to develop a new vision for Europe, or it could be used to justify leaving the European Union.

How should Europe solve its problems?

I would say that the first thing we have to think about is what the purpose of the European Union actually is. Is there any purpose? Why Europe and not the whole world? Why not do it alone in Germany, or the UK, or France?

I think there are four answers in this respect. First, the European Union is about enemies becoming neighbours. In the context of European history this actually constitutes something of a miracle. The second purpose of the European Union is that it can prevent countries from being lost in world politics. A post-European Britain, or a post-European Germany, is a lost Britain, and a lost Germany. Europe is part of what makes these countries important from a global perspective.

The third point is that we should not only think about a new Europe, we also have to think about how the European nations have to change. They are part of the process and I would say that Europe is about redefining the national interest in a European way. Europe is not an obstacle to national sovereignty; it is the necessary means to improve national sovereignty. Nationalism is now the enemy of the nation because only through the European Union can these countries have genuine sovereignty.

The fourth point is that European modernity, which has been distributed all over the world, is a suicidal project. It’s producing all kinds of basic problems, such as climate change and the financial crisis. It’s a bit like if a car company created a car without any brakes and it started to cause accidents: the company would take these cars back to redesign them and that’s exactly what Europe should do with modernity. Reinventing modernity could be a specific purpose for Europe.

Taken together these four points form what you could say is a grand narrative of Europe, but one basic issue is missing in the whole design. So far we’ve thought about things like institutions, law, and economics, but we haven’t asked what the European Union means for individuals. What do individuals gain from the European project? First of all I would say that, particularly in terms of the younger generation, more Europe is producing more freedom. It’s not only about the free movement of people across Europe; it’s also about opening up your own perspective and living in a space which is essentially grounded on law.

Second, European workers, but also students as well, are now confronted with the kind of existential uncertainty which needs an answer. Half of the best educated generation in Spanish and Greek history lack any future prospects. So what we need is a vision for a social Europe in the sense that the individual can see that there is not necessarily social security, but that there is less uncertainty. Finally we need to redefine democracy from the bottom up. We need to ask how an individual can become engaged with the European project. In that respect I have made a manifesto, along with Daniel Cohn-Bendit, called “We Are Europe”, arguing that we need a free year for everyone to do a project in another country with other Europeans in order to start a European civil society.

A more detailed discussion of the topics covered in this article is available in Ulrich Beck’s latest book, German Europe (Polity 2013). This interview was first published on EUROPP@LSE

Mascote em extinção? (Ciência Hoje)

25/03/2013UncategorizedAnimais, Extinção, Interação humanos-animais, Jogos Olímpicos, Macacos, Muriquirenzotaddei

Pesquisadores criam plano de ação para preservar o macaco muriqui. Confira a entrevista concedida por um dos responsáveis pelo projeto à CH On-line.

Por: Mariana Rocha, Ciência Hoje On-line

Publicado em 19/03/2013 | Atualizado em 20/03/2013

Maior primata não humano das Américas, o muriqui sofre em função do desmatamento desenfreado e da caça para consumo humano. (foto: Sinara Conessa/ Flickr – CC BY 2.0)

Menos de três mil exemplares. É tudo o que resta do macaco muriqui na Mata Atlântica. Forte candidato a mascote das Olimpíadas de 2016, o primata corre o risco de sumir das florestas por conta do desmatamento desenfreado e da caça para consumo humano. No intuito de reverter esse quadro, pesquisadores traçam estratégias para garantir a sobrevivência do muriqui.

Batizado de Plano de Ação Nacional para a Conservação dos Muriquis (PAN Muriquis) e desenvolvido no âmbito do Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade(ICMBio), o projeto conta com dez metas e 54 ações. As atividades são diversas e englobam medidas como a contagem das populações de muriquis, a fiscalização das florestas para protegê-los de caçadores e iniciativas de educação ambiental que conscientizem a população sobre a importância do macaco.

Na lista vermelha da União Internacional para a Conservação da Natureza, o muriqui-do-norte, que ocupa Minas Gerais e Espírito Santo, é classificado como animal criticamente em perigo e, dentro de três gerações, pode sofrer uma redução populacional de 80%. Já o muriqui-do-sul, encontrado no Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo e norte do Paraná, é classificado como espécie em perigo e pode ter sua população diminuída em pelo menos 20% dentro de duas gerações.

Até 2020, o PAN Muriquis pretende retroceder em pelo menos um nível o risco de extinção do primata. A meta é fazer com que o muriqui-do-norte seja classificado como espécie em perigo e o do sul como vulnerável.

Candidato a mascote

De origem indígena, a palavra muriqui significa povo manso da floresta e descreve um animal de comportamento pacífico e solidário. O hábito de abraçar seus companheiros fez do macaco um forte candidato a representar os anfitriões brasileiros nas Olimpíadas de 2016.

Veja vídeo da campanha em favor do muriqui como mascote das Olimpíadas de 2016

A campanha para eleger o primata-mascote do evento conta com o apoio de instituições envolvidas no PAN Muriquis e discute a necessidade de preservá-lo.

Para saber mais sobre ações que buscam garantir a sobrevivência do macaco muriqui, a CH On-line conversou com Maurício Talebi, bioantropólogo da Universidade Federal de São Paulo-Diadema e coautor do PAN Muriquis.

Como e quando começou a elaboração do PAN Muriquis?
O projeto surgiu a partir do Plano de Sobrevivência das Espécies, uma ferramenta conceitual da Comissão de Sobrevivência das Espécies (CSE), uma divisão da União Internacional para Conservação da Natureza. A CSE desenvolve atividades para a conservação de diversas espécies ameaçadas no planeta. O documento que descreve as ações do PAN Muriqui começou a ser desenvolvido em 2003 pelo ICMBio e foi finalizado em 2010. Esse planejamento contou com a participação de diversos setores da sociedade, como governo, universidades e organizações não governamentais.

Quais são as principais atividades do homem que prejudicam os muriquis?
Diversas ameaças acometem populações selvagens de muriquis. As principais são a redução de hábitat, caça ilegal, baixos investimentos em vigilância e fiscalização, índices reduzidos de reprodução em cativeiro e a fragmentação do hábitat em ilhas de florestas.

O senhor coordena o monitoramento das populações de muriquis em vários locais – alguns deles já são estudados há 20 anos. Como essa medida auxilia no planejamento de ações para preservar os muriquis?
Pesquisas de longa duração são fundamentais por vários motivos. É importante obter informações sobre os animais em várias épocas do ano, conhecer seu comportamento frente a variações ambientais, entender como eles organizam sua vida cotidiana e como executam tarefas vitais para a sobrevivência. Obtemos, também, informações sobre quais variáveis ambientais devem ser levadas em conta durante ações de reflorestamento do hábitat desses primatas. Complementarmente, esses estudos propiciam o treinamento das futuras gerações de pesquisadores. Nosso grupo de pesquisa na Associação Pró-muriqui treinou mais de 200 estudantes de graduação e pós-graduação nos últimos dez anos.

Quais são as principais dificuldades na execução do PAN Muriquis?
O principal fator restritivo é a baixa disponibilidade de recursos financeiros. Atualmente, contamos com recursos humanos qualificados para a execução desses trabalhos, mas faltam recursos para financiar a mão de obra. Uma das metas é criar um fundo financeiro que viabilize a execução de todas as ações do plano. Lamentamos que, no Brasil, os fundos financeiros para a conservação de hábitat e de espécies ainda sejam praticamente inexistentes.

O senhor acredita que a candidatura do muriqui a mascote das Olimpíadas de 2016 pode auxiliar na preservação do primata?

Caso seja confirmado como mascote olímpico, o muriqui será conhecido globalmente e diversos setores da economia se interessarão por investir em um emblema tão poderoso quanto ele

Certamente sim. A maioria dos brasileiros desconhece que o maior primata (não humano) das Américas ocorre exclusivamente em nosso país. Caso seja confirmado como mascote olímpico, o muriqui será conhecido globalmente e diversos setores da economia se interessarão por investir em um emblema tão poderoso quanto ele. Assim, será possível conseguir recursos para os esforços que poucos brasileiros e estudantes estão fazendo para a pesquisa e conservação da espécie. A conscientização nos níveis nacional e internacional poderá gerar recursos para continuarmos trabalhando e assim contribuirmos para que o muriqui possa ser visto ao vivo e a cores em seu hábitat natural pelas futuras gerações.

Este texto foi atualizado para incluir a seguinte alteração:
Além de Rio de Janeiro e São Paulo, o muriqui-do-sul é encontrado no norte do Paraná. (20/03/2013)

‘Networked Minds’ Require Fundamentally New Kind of Economics (Science Daily)

25/03/2013UncategorizedAltruísmo, Cognição, Cooperação, Economia, Interatividade, Mídia, Mediação tecnológica, participatividade, Redes sociaisrenzotaddei

Mar. 20, 2013 — In their computer simulations of human evolution, scientists at ETH Zurich find the emergence of the “homo socialis” with “other-regarding” preferences. The results explain some intriguing findings in experimental economics and call for a new economic theory of “networked minds”.

In their computer simulations of human evolution, scientists at ETH Zurich find the emergence of the “homo socialis” with “other-regarding” preferences. The results explain some intriguing findings in experimental economics and call for a new economic theory of “networked minds”. (Credit: © violetkaipa / Fotolia)

Economics has a beautiful body of theory. But does it describe real markets? Doubts have come up not only in the wake of the financial crisis, since financial crashes should not occur according to the then established theories. Since ages, economic theory is based on concepts such as efficient markets and the “homo economicus”, i.e. the assumption of competitively optimizing individuals and firms. It was believed that any behavior deviating from this would create disadvantages and, hence, be eliminated by natural selection. But experimental evidence from behavioral economics show that, on average, people behave more fairness-oriented and other-regarding than expected. A new theory by scientists from ETH Zurich now explains why.

“We have simulated interactions of individuals facing social dilemma situations, where it would be favorable for everyone to cooperate, but non-cooperative behavior is tempting,” explains Dr. Thomas Grund, one of the authors of the study. “Hence, cooperation tends to erode, which is bad for everyone.” This may create tragedies of the commons such as over-fishing, environmental pollution, or tax evasion.

Evolution of “friendliness”

Prof. Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich, who coordinated the study, adds: “Compared to conventional models for the evolution of social cooperation, we have distinguished between the actual behavior – cooperation or not – and an inherited character trait, describing the degree of other-regarding preferences, which we call the friendliness.” The actual behavior considers not only the own advantage (“payoff”), but also gives a weight to the payoff of the interaction partners depending on the individual friendliness. For the “homo economicus”, the weight is zero. The friendliness spreads from one generation to the next according to natural selection. This is merely based on the own payoff, but mutations happen.

For most parameter combinations, the model predicts the evolution of a payoff-maximizing “homo economicus” with selfish preferences, as assumed by a great share of the economic literature. Very surprisingly, however, biological selection may create a “homo socialis” with other-regarding preferences, namely if offsprings tend to stay close to their parents. In such a case, clusters of friendly people, who are “conditionally cooperative”, may evolve over time.

If an unconditionally cooperative individual is born by chance, it may be exploited by everyone and not leave any offspring. However, if born in a favorable, conditionally cooperative environment, it may trigger cascade-like transitions to cooperative behavior, such that other-regarding behavior pays off. Consequently, a “homo socialis” spreads.

Networked minds create a cooperative human species

“This has fundamental implications for the way, economic theories should look like,” underlines Professor Helbing. Most of today’s economic knowledge is for the “homo economicus”, but people wonder whether that theory really applies. A comparable body of work for the “homo socialis” still needs to be written.

While the “homo economicus” optimizes its utility independently, the “homo socialis” puts himself or herself into the shoes of others to consider their interests as well,” explains Grund, and Helbing adds: “This establishes something like “networked minds”. Everyone’s decisions depend on the preferences of others.” This becomes even more important in our networked world.

A participatory kind of economy

How will this change our economy? Today, many customers doubt that they get the best service by people who are driven by their own profits and bonuses. “Our theory predicts that the level of other-regarding preferences is distributed broadly, from selfish to altruistic. Academic education in economics has largely promoted the selfish type. Perhaps, our economic thinking needs to fundamentally change, and our economy should be run by different kinds of people,” suggests Grund. “The true capitalist has other-regarding preferences,” adds Helbing, “as the “homo socialis” earns much more payoff.” This is, because the “homo socialis” manages to overcome the downwards spiral that tends to drive the “homo economicus” towards tragedies of the commons. The breakdown of trust and cooperation in the financial markets back in 2008 might be seen as good example.

“Social media will promote a new kind of participatory economy, in which competition goes hand in hand with cooperation,” believes Helbing. Indeed, the digital economy’s paradigm of the “prosumer” states that the Internet, social platforms, 3D printers and other developments will enable the co-producing consumer. “It will be hard to tell who is consumer and who is producer”, says Christian Waloszek. “You might be both at the same time, and this creates a much more cooperative perspective.”

Journal Reference:

Thomas Grund, Christian Waloszek, Dirk Helbing. How Natural Selection Can Create Both Self- and Other-Regarding Preferences, and Networked Minds.Scientific Reports, 2013; 3 DOI: 10.1038/srep01480

DNA Damage Occurs as Part of Normal Brain Activity, Scientists Discover (Science Daily)

25/03/2013UncategorizedGenética, neurociênciasrenzotaddei

Mar. 24, 2013 — Scientists at the Gladstone Institutes have discovered that a certain type of DNA damage long thought to be particularly detrimental to brain cells can actually be part of a regular, non-harmful process. The team further found that disruptions to this process occur in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease — and identified two therapeutic strategies that reduce these disruptions.

Neurons. Scientists have discovered that a certain type of DNA damage long thought to be particularly detrimental to brain cells can actually be part of a regular, non-harmful process. (Credit: © Roberto Robuffo / Fotolia)

Scientists have long known that DNA damage occurs in every cell, accumulating as we age. But a particular type of DNA damage, known as a double-strand break, or DSB, has long been considered a major force behind age-related illnesses such as Alzheimer’s. Today, researchers in the laboratory of Gladstone Senior Investigator Lennart Mucke, MD, report in Nature Neuroscience that DSBs in neuronal cells in the brain can also be part of normal brain functions such as learning — as long as the DSBs are tightly controlled and repaired in good time. Further, the accumulation of the amyloid-beta protein in the brain — widely thought to be a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease — increases the number of neurons with DSBs and delays their repair.

“It is both novel and intriguing team’s finding that the accumulation and repair of DSBs may be part of normal learning,” said Fred H. Gage, PhD, of the Salk Institute who was not involved in this study. “Their discovery that the Alzheimer’s-like mice exhibited higher baseline DSBs, which weren’t repaired, increases these findings’ relevance and provides new understanding of this deadly disease’s underlying mechanisms.”

In laboratory experiments, two groups of mice explored a new environment filled with unfamiliar sights, smells and textures. One group was genetically modified to simulate key aspects of Alzheimer’s, and the other was a healthy, control group. As the mice explored, their neurons became stimulated as they processed new information. After two hours, the mice were returned to their familiar, home environment.

The investigators then examined the neurons of the mice for markers of DSBs. The control group showed an increase in DSBs right after they explored the new environment — but after being returned to their home environment, DSB levels dropped.

“We were initially surprised to find neuronal DSBs in the brains of healthy mice,” said Elsa Suberbielle, DVM, PhD, Gladstone postdoctoral fellow and the paper’s lead author. “But the close link between neuronal stimulation and DSBs, and the finding that these DSBs were repaired after the mice returned to their home environment, suggest that DSBs are an integral part of normal brain activity. We think that this damage-and-repair pattern might help the animals learn by facilitating rapid changes in the conversion of neuronal DNA into proteins that are involved in forming memories.”

The group of mice modified to simulate Alzheimer’s had higher DSB levels at the start — levels that rose even higher during neuronal stimulation. In addition, the team noticed a substantial delay in the DNA-repair process.

To counteract the accumulation of DSBs, the team first used a therapeutic approach built on two recent studies — one of which was led by Dr. Mucke and his team — that showed the widely used anti-epileptic drug levetiracetam could improve neuronal communication and memory in both mouse models of Alzheimer’s and in humans in the disease’s earliest stages. The mice they treated with the FDA-approved drug had fewer DSBs. In their second strategy, they genetically modified mice to lack the brain protein called tau — another protein implicated in Alzheimer’s. This manipulation, which they had previously found to prevent abnormal brain activity, also prevented the excessive accumulation of DSBs.

The team’s findings suggest that restoring proper neuronal communication is important for staving off the effects of Alzheimer’s — perhaps by maintaining the delicate balance between DNA damage and repair.

“Currently, we have no effective treatments to slow, prevent or halt Alzheimer’s, from which more than 5 million people suffer in the United States alone,” said Dr. Mucke, who directs neurological research at Gladstone and is a professor of neuroscience and neurology at the University of California, San Francisco, with which Gladstone is affiliated. “The need to decipher the causes of Alzheimer’s and to find better therapeutic solutions has never been more important — or urgent. Our results suggest that readily available drugs could help protect neurons against some of the damages inflicted by this illness. In the future, we will further explore these therapeutic strategies. We also hope to gain a deeper understanding of the role that DSBs play in learning and memory — and in the disruption of these important brain functions by Alzheimer’s disease.”

Other scientists who participated in this research at Gladstone include Pascal Sanchez, PhD, Alexxai Kravitz, PhD, Xin Wang, Kaitlyn Ho, Kirsten Eilertson, PhD, Nino Devidze, PhD, and Anatol Kreitzer, PhD. This research was supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the S.D. Bechtel, Jr. Foundation.

Journal Reference:

Elsa Suberbielle, Pascal E Sanchez, Alexxai V Kravitz, Xin Wang, Kaitlyn Ho, Kirsten Eilertson, Nino Devidze, Anatol C Kreitzer, Lennart Mucke. Physiologic brain activity causes DNA double-strand breaks in neurons, with exacerbation by amyloid-β. Nature Neuroscience, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nn.3356

Cracking the Semantic Code: Half a Word’s Meaning Is 3-D Summary of Associated Rewards (Science Daily)

21/03/2013UncategorizedCultura, Interatividade, Linguagem, Linguística, Mediação tecnológica, Redes sociaisrenzotaddei

Feb. 13, 2013 — We make choices about pretty much everything, all the time — “Should I go for a walk or grab a coffee?”; “Shall I look at who just came in or continue to watch TV?” — and to do so we need something common as a basis to make the choice.

Half of a word’s meaning is simply a three dimensional summary of the rewards associated with it, according to an analysis of millions of blog entries. (Credit: © vlorzor / Fotolia)

Dr John Fennell and Dr Roland Baddeley of Bristol’s School of Experimental Psychology followed a hunch that the common quantity, often referred to simply as reward, was a representation of what could be gained, together with how risky and uncertain it is. They proposed that these dimensions would be a unique feature of all objects and be part of what those things mean to us.

Over 50 years ago, psychologist Charles Osgood developed an influential method, known as the ‘semantic differential’, that attempts to measure the connotative, emotional meaning of a word or concept. Osgood found that about 50 per cent of the variation in a large number of ratings that people made about words and concepts could be captured using just three summary dimensions: ‘evaluation’ (how nice or good the object is), ‘potency’ (how strong or powerful an object is) and ‘activity’ (whether the object is active, unpredictable or chaotic). So, half of a concept’s meaning is simply a measure of how nice, strong, and active it is. The main problem is that, until now, no one knew why.

Dr Baddeley explained: “Over time, we keep a running tally of all the good and bad things associated with a particular object. Later, when faced with a decision, we can simply choose the option that in the past has been associated with more good things than bad. This dimension of choice sounds very much like the ‘evaluation’ dimension of the semantic differential.”

To test this, the researchers needed to estimate the number of good or bad things happening. At first sight, estimating this across a wide range of contexts and concepts seems impossible; someone would need to be observed throughout his or her lifetime and, for each of a large range of contexts and concepts, the number of times good and bad things happened recorded. Fortunately, a more practical solution is provided by the recent phenomenon of internet blogs, which describe aspects of people’s lives and are also searchable. Sure enough, after analysing millions of blog entries, the researchers found that the evaluation dimension was a very good predictor of whether a particular word was found in blogs describing good situations or bad.

Interestingly, they also found that how frequently a word was used was also a good predictor of how much we like it. This is a well-known effect — the ‘mere exposure effect’ — and a mainstay of the multi-billion dollar advertising industry. When comparing two options we just choose the option we like the most — and we like it because in the past it has been associated with more good things.

Analysing the data showed that ‘potency’ was a very good predictor of the probability of bad situations being associated with a given object: it measured one kind of risk.

Dr Fennell said: “This kind of way of quantifying risk is called ‘value at risk’ in financial circles, and the perils of ignoring it have been plain to see. Russian Roulette may be, on average, associated with positive rewards, but the risks associated with it are not for everyone!”

It is not the only kind of risk, though. In many situations, ‘activity’ — that is, unpredictability, or more importantly uncontrollability — is a highly relevant measure of risk: a knife in the hands of a highly trained sushi chef is probably safe, a knife in the hands of a drunk, erratic stranger is definitely not.

Dr Fennell continued: “Again, this different kind of risk is relevant in financial dealings and is often called volatility. It seems that the mistake that was made in the credit crunch was not ignoring this kind of risk, but to assume that you could perfectly guess it based on how unpredictable it had been in the past.”

Thus, the researchers propose that half of meaning is simply a summary of how rewarding, and importantly, how much of two kinds of risk is associated with an object. Being sensitive not only to rewards, but also to risks, is so important to our survival, that it appears that its representation has become wrapped up in the very nature of the language we use to represent the world.

Journal Reference:

John G. Fennell, Roland J. Baddeley. Reward Is Assessed in Three Dimensions That Correspond to the Semantic Differential. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (2): e55588 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0055588

Dogs May Understand Human Point of View (Science Daily)

21/03/2013UncategorizedAnimais, Inteligência animal, Interação humanos-animais, Socialidade animalrenzotaddei

Feb. 11, 2013 — Domestic dogs are much more likely to steal food when they think nobody can see them, suggesting for the first time that dogs are capable of understanding a human’s point of view.

Dr Juliane Kaminski and her dog, Ambula. (Credit: Image courtesy of University of Portsmouth)

Many dog owners think their pets are clever or that they understand humans but, until now, this has not been tested by science.

Dr Juliane Kaminski, of the University of Portsmouth’s Department of Psychology, has shown that when a human forbids a dog from taking food, dogs are four times more likely to disobey in a dark room than a lit room, suggesting they take into account what the human can or cannot see.

Dr Kaminski said: “That’s incredible because it implies dogs understand the human can’t see them, meaning they might understand the human perspective.”

This is the first study to examine if dogs differentiate between different levels of light when they are developing strategies on whether to steal food. It is published in the journal Animal Cognition. The research was funded by the Max Planck Society, Dr Kaminski’s former employer.

Dr Kaminski said: “Humans constantly attribute certain qualities and emotions to other living things. We know that our own dog is clever or sensitive, but that’s us thinking, not them.

“These results suggest humans might be right, where dogs are concerned, but we still can’t be completely sure if the results mean dogs have a truly flexible understanding of the mind and others’ minds. It has always been assumed only humans had this ability.”

The research is an incremental step in our understanding of dogs’ ability to think and to understand which could, in turn, be of use to those working with dogs and those who keep them as pets.

Dr Kaminski ran a series of experiments in varied light conditions. In each test, a dog was forbidden by a human from taking the food. When the room was dark, the dogs took more food and took it more quickly than when the room was lit.

The tests were complex and involved many variables to rule out that dogs were basing their decisions on simple associative rules, for example, that dark means food.

There is no evidence on how well dogs can see in the dark, but the results of this research show dogs can differentiate between light and dark.

Dr Kaminski said: “The results of these tests suggest that dogs are deciding it’s safer to steal the food when the room is dark because they understand something of the human’s perspective.”

Dogs’ understanding may be limited to the here and now, rather than on any higher understanding, Dr Kaminski said, and more research is needed to identify what mechanisms are controlling dogs’ behaviour.

In total, 42 female and 42 male domestic dogs aged one year or older took part in the tests. They were chosen only if they were comfortable without their owners in the room, even in complete darkness, and if they were interested in food. “Some dogs are more interested in by food than others,” Dr Kaminski said.

Previous studies have shown chimpanzees have a sophisticated understanding and seem to know when someone else can or can’t see them and can also remember what others have seen in the past. It is not known how sophisticated dogs’ understanding is in comparison. Many earlier research papers have found that, for dogs, a human’s eyes are an important signal when deciding how to behave, and that they respond more willingly to attentive humans, than inattentive ones.

Journal Reference:

Juliane Kaminski, Andrea Pitsch, Michael Tomasello. Dogs steal in the dark. Animal Cognition, 2012; DOI:10.1007/s10071-012-0579-6

Gene Today, Gone Tomorrow: Genes for Autism and Schizophrenia Only Active in Developing Brains (Science Daily)

21/03/2013UncategorizedAutismo, Epigenética, esquizofreniarenzotaddei

Feb. 11, 2013 — Genes linked to autism and schizophrenia are only switched on during the early stages of brain development, according to a study in mice led by researchers at the University of Oxford.

This new study adds to the evidence that autism and schizophrenia are neurodevelopmental disorders, a term describing conditions that originate during early brain development.

The researchers studied gene expression in the brains of mice throughout their development, from 15-day old embryos to adults, and their results are published recently inProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study is a collaboration between researchers from the University of Oxford, King’s College London and Imperial College London, and was funded by the Medical Research Council and the Wellcome Trust.

The research focused on cells in the ‘subplate’, a region of the brain where the first neurons (nerve cells) develop. Subplate neurons are essential to brain development, and provide the earliest connections within the brain.

‘The subplate provides the scaffolding required for a brain to grow, so is important to consider when studying brain development,’ says Professor Zoltán Molnár, senior author of the paper from the University of Oxford, ‘Looking at the pyramids in Egypt today doesn’t tell us how they were actually built. Studying adult brains is like looking at the pyramids today, but by studying the developing brains we are able to see the transient scaffolding that has been used to construct it.’

The study shows that certain genes linked to autism and schizophrenia are only active in the subplate during specific stages of development. ‘The majority of the autism susceptibility genes are only expressed in the subplate of the developing mouse brain,’ explains Dr Anna Hoerder-Suabedissen, who led the study at the University of Oxford, ‘Many can only be found at certain stages of development, making them difficult to identify at later stages using previous techniques.’

The group were able to map gene activity in full detail thanks to powerful new methods which allowed them to dissect and profile gene expression from small numbers of cells. This also enabled them to identify the different populations of subplate neurons more accurately.

Subplate neurons were first discovered in the 1970s by Professors Ivica Kostović and Pasko Rakic of Yale University.

‘I am excited to see tangible genetic links supporting, even indirectly, the idea of a possible role of the transient embryonic subplate zone in the origin of disorders such as autism and schizophrenia,’ says Professor Rakic, ‘If this is possible to show in mice, where the subplate is relatively small, it is likely to be even more pronounced in humans, where it is much more evolved.

‘The study from Professor Molnár’s group at Oxford may be the first step toward finding more such links in the future and opens the possibility of directly examining the roles of genetic variation and exposure to various environmental factors in animal models.’

Professor David Edwards, Director of the Centre for the Developing Brain at King’s College London, and co-author of the paper, said: ‘Using advanced techniques we have been able to define the biochemical pathways that are important during a particular phase of brain developme

nt. It has been suspected for a long time that if the development of the cortex is disrupted by genetic abnormalities or environmental stress (such as prematurity) this would have long-lasting adverse effects on brain development and could lead to problems like ADHD or autism. This study defines genes that are important in mice at this critical period and this does indeed seem to include genes known to predispose to autism and schizophrenia. It focuses attention even more firmly on early brain development as a cause of these distressing neuropsychological problems.’

Professor Hugh Perry, chair of the Medical Research Council’s Neuroscience and Mental Health Board, said: ‘By being able to pinpoint common genetic factors for neurological conditions such as autism and schizophrenia, scientists are able to understand an important part of the story as to why things go awry as our brains develop. The Medical Research Council’s commitment to a broad portfolio of neuroscience and mental health research places us in a unique position to respond to the challenge of mental ill health and its relationship with physical health and wellbeing.’

Security Risks of Extreme Weather and Climate Change (Science Daily)

21/03/2013UncategorizedClima, Conflito internacional, Incerteza, Mudanças climáticas, Política, Previsão, Violênciarenzotaddei

Feb. 11, 2013 — A Harvard researcher is pointing toward a new reason to worry about the effects of climate change — national security.

Hurricane Katrina. Predicted changes in extremes include more record high temperatures; fewer but stronger tropical cyclones; wider areas of drought and increases in precipitation; increased climate variability; Arctic warming and attendant impacts; and continued sea level rise as greenhouse warming continues and even accelerates. (Credit: NOAA)

A new report co-authored by Michael McElroy, the Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies, and D. James Baker, a former administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, connects global climate change, extreme weather, and national security. During the next decade, the report concludes, climate change could have wide-reaching effects on everything from food, water, and energy supplies to critical infrastructure and economic security.

“Over the last century, the trend has been toward urbanization — to concentrate people in smaller areas,” McElroy said. “We’ve built an infrastructure — whether it’s where we build our homes or where we put our roads and bridges — that fits with that trend. If the weather pattern suddenly changes in a serious way, it could create very large problems. Bridges may be in the wrong place, or sea walls may not be high enough.”

Possible effects on critical infrastructure, however, only scratch the surface of the security concerns.

On an international scale, the report points to recent events, such as flooding in Pakistan and sustained drought in eastern Africa, that may be tied to changing weather patterns. How the United States responds to such disasters — whether by delivering humanitarian aid or through technical support — could affect security.

“By recognizing the immediacy of these risks, the U.S. can enhance its own security and help other countries do a better job of preparing for and coping with near-term climate extremes,” Baker said.

The report suggests that climate changes could even have long-reaching political effects.

It’s possible, McElroy said, that climate changes may have contributed to the uprisings of the Arab Spring by causing a rise in food prices, or that the extended drought in northern Mexico has contributed to political instability and a rise in drug trafficking in the region.

“We don’t have definitive answers, but our report raises these questions, because what we are saying is that these conditions are likely to be more normal than they were in the past,” McElroy said. “There are also questions related to sea-level rise. The conventional wisdom is that sea level is rising by a small amount, but observations show it’s rising about twice as fast as the models suggested. Could it actually go up by a large amount in a short period? I don’t think you can rule that out.”

Other potential effects, McElroy said, are tied to changes in an atmospheric circulation pattern called the Hadley circulation, in which warm tropical air rises, resulting in tropical rains. As the air moves to higher latitudes, it descends, causing the now-dry air to heat up. Regions where the hot, dry air returns to the surface are typically dominated by desert.

The problem, he said, is that evidence shows those arid regions are expanding.

“The observational data suggest that the Hadley circulation has expanded by several degrees in latitude,” McElroy said. “That’s a big deal, because if you shift where deserts are by just a few degrees, you’re talking about moving the southwestern desert into the grain-producing region of the country, or moving the Sahara into southern Europe.”

The report is the result of the authors’ involvement with Medea, a group of scientists who support the U.S. government by examining declassified national security data useful for scientific inquiry. In recent decades, the group has worked with officials in the United States and Russia to declassify data on climatic conditions in the Arctic and thousands of spy satellite images. Those images have been used to study ancient settlement patterns in the Middle East and changes in Arctic ice.

“I would be reluctant to say that our report is the last word on short-term climate change,” McElroy said. “Climate change is a moving target. We’ve done an honest, useful assessment of the state of play today, but we will need more information and more hard work to get it right. One of the recommendations in our report is the need for a serious investment in measurement and observation. It’s really important to keep doing that, otherwise we’re going to be flying blind.”

The study was conducted with funds provided by the Central Intelligence Agency. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the CIA or the U.S. government.

Report: Climate Extremes: Recent Trends with Implications for National Security at www.environment.harvard.edu/climate-extremes

Red Brain, Blue Brain: Republicans and Democrats Process Risk Differently, Research Finds (Science Daily)

21/03/2013UncategorizedCérebro, Mediação tecnológica, neurociências, Neurofisiologia, Políticarenzotaddei

Feb. 13, 2013 — A team of political scientists and neuroscientists has shown that liberals and conservatives use different parts of the brain when they make risky decisions, and these regions can be used to predict which political party a person prefers. The new study suggests that while genetics or parental influence may play a significant role, being a Republican or Democrat changes how the brain functions.

Republicans and Democrats differ in the neural mechanisms activated while performing a risk-taking task. Republicans more strongly activate their right amygdala, associated with orienting attention to external cues. Democrats have higher activity in their left posterior insula, associated with perceptions of internal physiological states. This activation also borders the temporal-parietal junction, and therefore may reflect a difference in internal physiological drive as well as the perception of the internal state and drive of others. (Credit: From: Darren Schreiber, Greg Fonzo, Alan N. Simmons, Christopher T. Dawes, Taru Flagan, James H. Fowler, Martin P. Paulus. Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (2): e52970 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0052970)

Dr. Darren Schreiber, a researcher in neuropolitics at the University of Exeter, has been working in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California, San Diego on research that explores the differences in the way the brain functions in American liberals and conservatives. The findings are published Feb. 13 in the journalPLOS ONE.

In a prior experiment, participants had their brain activity measured as they played a simple gambling game. Dr. Schreiber and his UC San Diego collaborators were able to look up the political party registration of the participants in public records. Using this new analysis of 82 people who performed the gambling task, the academics showed that Republicans and Democrats do not differ in the risks they take. However, there were striking differences in the participants’ brain activity during the risk-taking task.

Democrats showed significantly greater activity in the left insula, a region associated with social and self-awareness. Meanwhile Republicans showed significantly greater activity in the right amygdala, a region involved in the body’s fight-or-flight system. These results suggest that liberals and conservatives engage different cognitive processes when they think about risk.

In fact, brain activity in these two regions alone can be used to predict whether a person is a Democrat or Republican with 82.9% accuracy. By comparison, the longstanding traditional model in political science, which uses the party affiliation of a person’s mother and father to predict the child’s affiliation, is only accurate about 69.5% of the time. And another model based on the differences in brain structure distinguishes liberals from conservatives with only 71.6% accuracy.

The model also outperforms models based on differences in genes. Dr. Schreiber said: “Although genetics have been shown to contribute to differences in political ideology and strength of party politics, the portion of variation in political affiliation explained by activity in the amygdala and insula is significantly larger, suggesting that affiliating with a political party and engaging in a partisan environment may alter the brain, above and beyond the effect of heredity.”

These results may pave the way for new research on voter behaviour, yielding better understanding of the differences in how liberals and conservatives think. According to Dr. Schreiber: “The ability to accurately predict party politics using only brain activity while gambling suggests that investigating basic neural differences between voters may provide us with more powerful insights than the traditional tools of political science.”

Journal Reference:

Darren Schreiber, Greg Fonzo, Alan N. Simmons, Christopher T. Dawes, Taru Flagan, James H. Fowler, Martin P. Paulus. Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS ONE, 2013; 8 (2): e52970 DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0052970

A War Without End, With Earth’s Carbon Cycle Held in the Balance (Science Daily)

21/03/2013UncategorizedCarbono, Ecologia, Oceanosrenzotaddei

Feb. 13, 2013 — The greatest battle in Earth’s history has been going on for hundreds of millions of years — it isn’t over yet — and until now no one knew it existed, scientists reported Feb. 13 in the journalNature.

This SAR11 bacterium is infected with a Pelagiphage virus. (Credit: Image courtesy of Oregon State University)

In one corner is SAR11, a bacterium that’s the most abundant organism in the oceans, survives where most other cells would die and plays a major role in the planet’s carbon cycle. It had been theorized that SAR11 was so small and widespread that it must be invulnerable to attack.

In the other corner, and so strange-looking that scientists previously didn’t even recognize what they were, are “Pelagiphages,” viruses now known to infect SAR11 and routinely kill millions of these cells every second. And how this fight turns out is of more than casual interest, because SAR11 has a huge effect on the amount of carbon dioxide that enters the atmosphere, and the overall biology of the oceans.

“There’s a war going on in our oceans, a huge war, and we never even saw it,” said Stephen Giovannoni, a professor of microbiology at Oregon State University. “This is an important piece of the puzzle in how carbon is stored or released in the sea.”

Researchers from OSU, the University of Arizona and other institutions have just outlined the discovery of this ongoing conflict, and its implications for the biology and function of ocean processes. The findings disprove the theory that SAR11 cells are immune to viral predation, researchers said.

“In general, every living cell is vulnerable to viral infection,” said Giovannoni, who first discovered SAR11 in 1990. “What has been so puzzling about SAR11 was its sheer abundance; there was simply so much of it that some scientists believed it must not get attacked by viruses.”

What the new research shows, Giovannoni said, is that SAR11 is competitive, good at scavenging organic carbon, and effective at changing to avoid infection. Because of that, it thrives and persists in abundance even though it’s constantly being killed by the new viruses that have been discovered.

The discovery of the Pelagiphage viral families was made by Yanlin Zhao, Michael Schwalbach and Ben Temperton, OSU postdoctoral researchers working with Giovannoni. They used traditional research methods, growing cells and viruses from nature in a laboratory, instead of sequencing DNA from nature. The new viruses were so unique that computers could not recognize the virus DNA.

“The viruses themselves, of course, appear to be just as abundant as SAR11,” Giovannoni said. “Our colleagues at the University of Arizona demonstrated this with new technologies they developed for measuring viral diversity.”

SAR11 has several unique characteristics, including the smallest known genetic structure of any independent cell. Through sheer numbers, this microbe has a huge role in consuming organic carbon, which it uses to generate energy while producing carbon dioxide and water in the process. SAR11 recycles organic matter, providing the nutrients needed by algae to produce about half of the oxygen that enters Earth’s atmosphere every day.

This carbon cycle ultimately affects all plant and animal life on Earth.

Journal Reference:

Yanlin Zhao, Ben Temperton, J. Cameron Thrash, Michael S. Schwalbach, Kevin L. Vergin, Zachary C. Landry, Mark Ellisman, Tom Deerinck, Matthew B. Sullivan, Stephen J. Giovannoni. Abundant SAR11 viruses in the ocean.Nature, 2013; DOI: 10.1038/nature11921

Epigenetics Shapes Fate of Brain Vs. Brawn Castes in Carpenter Ants (Science Daily)

21/03/2013UncategorizedEpigenética, Formigasrenzotaddei

Feb. 13, 2013 — The recently published genome sequences of seven well-studied ant species are opening up new vistas for biology and medicine. A detailed look at molecular mechanisms that underlie the complex behavioral differences in two worker castes in the Florida carpenter ant, Camponotus floridanus, has revealed a link to epigenetics. This is the study of how the expression or suppression of particular genes by chemical modifications affects an organism’s physical characteristics, development, and behavior. Epigenetic processes not only play a significant role in many diseases, but are also involved in longevity and aging.

Florida carpenter ants – minor (left) and major (right). (Credit: Courtesy Brittany Enzmann, Arizona State University)

Interdisciplinary research led by Shelley Berger, PhD, from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, in collaboration with teams led by Danny Reinberg from New York University and Juergen Liebig from Arizona State University, describe their work in Genome Research. The group found that epigenetic regulation is key to distinguishing one caste, the “majors,” as brawny Amazons of the carpenter ant colony, compared to the “minors,” their smaller, brainier sisters. These two castes have the same genes, but strikingly distinct behaviors and shape.

Ants, as well as termites and some bees and wasps, are eusocial species that organize themselves into rigid caste-based societies, or colonies, in which only one queen and a small contingent of male ants are usually fertile and reproduce. The rest of a colony is composed of functionally sterile females that are divided into worker castes that perform specialized roles such as foragers, soldiers, and caretakers. InCamponotus floridanus, there are two worker castes that are physically and behaviorally different, yet genetically very similar.

Lead author Daniel F. Simola, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher in the Penn Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, explains that “the major is also called a soldier, and it has a much larger head, so the force of its mandibles can break larger prey. It does more nest and colony defense.”

The minor caste, on the other hand, is smaller and more numerous. “They do most of the nursing within a colony, take care of the young, and they will also go out and collect most of the food,” says Simola. “On average, 75 to 80 percent of the foraging activity is done by the minors.” The minor also has a considerably shorter lifespan than the major caste, making the ant castes a good model for longevity studies as well as behavioral studies.

But how do such marked differences arise when both the major and the minor castes share the same genome? “For all intents and purposes, those two castes are identical when it comes to their gene sequences,” notes senior author Berger, professor of Cell and Developmental Biology. “The two castes are a perfect situation to understand how epigenetics, how regulation ‘above’ genes, plays a role in establishing these dramatic differences in a whole organism.”

To understand how caste differences arise, the team examined the role of modifications of histones (protein complexes around which DNA strands are wrapped in a cell’s nucleus) throughout the Camponotus floridanus genome, producing the first genome-wide epigenetic maps of genome structure in a social insect. Histones can be altered by the addition of small chemical groups, which affect the expression of genes. Therefore, specific histone modifications can create dramatic differences between genetically similar individuals, such as the physical and behavioral differences between ant castes.

“These chemical modifications of histones alter how compact the genome is in a certain region,” Simola explains. “Certain modifications allow DNA to open up more, and some of them to close DNA more. This, in turn, affects how genes get expressed, or turned on, to make proteins. These modifications establish specific features of different tissues within an individual, so we asked whether there are also overall differences in histone modifications between the brawny majors and the brainy minors that might alter specific features of the whole organism, such as behavior.”

In examining several different histone modifications, the team found a number of distinct differences between the major and minor castes. Simola states that the most notable modification, “both discriminates the two castes from each other and correlates well with the expression levels of different genes between the castes. And if you look at which genes are being expressed between these two castes, these genes correspond very nicely to the brainy versus brawny idea. In the majors we find that genes that are involved in muscle development are expressed at a higher level, whereas in the minors, many genes involved in brain development and neurotransmission are expressed at a higher level.”

These changes in histone modifications between ant castes are likely caused by a regulator gene, called CBP, that has “already been implicated in aspects of learning and behavior by genetic studies in mice and in certain human diseases,” Berger says. “The idea is that the same CBP regulator and histone modification are involved in a learned behavior in ants — foraging — mainly in the brainy minor caste, to establish a pattern of gene regulation that leads to neuronal patterning for figuring out where food is and being able to bring the food back to the nest.”

Simola notes that “we know from mouse studies that if you inactivate or delete the CBP regulator, it actually leads to significant learning deficits in addition to craniofacial muscular malformations. So from mammalian studies, it’s clear this is an important protein involved in learning and memory.”

These findings have established the crucial role of genome structure in general, and histone modifications in particular, in determining the acquisition of organism-level characteristics in ant castes. The research team is looking ahead to expand the work by manipulating the expression of the CBP regulator in ants to observe effects on caste development and behavior. They also hope to refine the technique of mapping histone modifications so that specific tissues, such as a brain from a single ant, can be analyzed, rather than using pooled samples, as in the current study.

Berger observes that all of the genes known to be major epigenetic regulators in mammals are conserved in ants, which makes them “a fantastic model for studying behavior and longevity. Ants provide an extraordinary opportunity to explore and understand the epigenetic processes that underlie many human diseases and the aging process.”

Berger is also the director of the Penn Epigenetics Program. The research was supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Collaborative Innovation Award, a postdoctoral training grant from the Penn Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, and a postdoctoral fellowship from the Helen Hay Whitney Foundation.

Journal Reference:

D. F. Simola, C. Ye, N. S. Mutti, K. Dolezal, R. Bonasio, J. Liebig, D. Reinberg, S. L. Berger. A chromatin link to caste identity in the carpenter ant Camponotus floridanus. Genome Research, 2012; DOI:10.1101/gr.148361.112

Na avaliação de especialistas, pré-sal deve trazer benefícios econômicos e científicos para o Brasil (Jornal da Ciência)

21/03/2013UncategorizedClima, Economia, Educação, Enquadramento, Incerteza, Meio ambiente, Mudanças climáticas, Opinião pública, Petróleo, Política, Pré-sal, Previsãorenzotaddei

JC e-mail 4665, de 15 de Fevereiro de 2013.

Viviane Monteiro

O país não pode perder a oportunidade de utilizar os royalties do petróleo para investir em educação e em pesquisas científicas

Apesar dos riscos ambientais, a exploração do petróleo da camada pré-sal deve assegurar ao país, em longo prazo, novos patamares de desenvolvimento, tanto econômico quanto cientifico e tecnológico. Essa é a opinião que prevalece entre especialistas e pesquisadores da área de petróleo do Instituto Alberto Luiz Coimbra de Pós-Graduação e Pesquisa de Engenharia da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (Coppe-UFRJ), da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES) e da Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (Poli-USP).

Para eles, o Brasil não pode perder a oportunidade de explorar o pré-sal e nem de utilizar os royalties do petróleo extraído dessa camada profunda para investir em educação e em pesquisas científicas e tecnológicas. Um dos objetivos desses investimentos deve ser produzir energias limpas e renováveis, que devem substituir o combustível fóssil no período “pós-petróleo”, o que deve ocorrer nas próximas cinco décadas, aproximadamente.

Diante da exploração do pré-sal, o diretor de tecnologia e inovação da Coppe/UFRJ, Segen Estefen, diz que o Brasil deve se tornar um dos líderes mundiais na produção de tecnologias de ponta tanto para a exploração de petróleo quanto para o desenvolvimento de energias limpas e renováveis. A exploração do pré-sal, segundo ele acredita, representa uma janela de oportunidades para o Brasil figurar entre os maiores produtores de petróleo do mundo, tornando-se um dos “pelotões” de frente da Organização dos Países Exportadores de Petróleo (OPEP).

Nos últimos dois anos, o país passou da 18ª para a 13ª posição no ranking dos produtores de petróleo, conforme o relatório “Statistical Review of World Energy 2011”, da empresa britânica British Petroleum (BP). Com as descobertas das jazidas do pré-sal, as estimativas para as reservas nacionais de petróleo cresceram de 8 bilhões de barris, por volta de 2006, para algo entre 60 bilhões e 70 bilhões, atualmente. Ao colocar esses números na ponta do lápis, Segen calcula que tais cifras representariam uma receita de US$ 4 trilhões para o país, levando-se em conta o preço atual (US$ 100) do barril de petróleo. Ou seja, é um montante similar ao valor corrente do Produto Interno Bruto (PIB) nacional de R$ 4,143 trilhões, em 2011.

Em termos de reservas de petróleo, o pesquisador e professor Eustáquio Vinícius de Castro, do Laboratório de Petróleo da UFES, concorda que o pré-sal colocará o Brasil entre os cinco maiores produtores do petróleo do mundo, como Arábia Saudita, Estados Unidos e Venezuela. “A tecnologia a ser desenvolvida para atender à exploração do pré-sal deve ser estendida, também, para outras áreas, sobretudo as indústrias metal-mecânica e a de química ambiental”, diz.

Como exemplo, Castro cita equipamentos de perfuração de áreas ultraprofundas capazes de suportar fortes pressões, que podem ser utilizados pela construção civil; e agentes químicos (aditivos) que devem estar presente nos aparelhos para remoção de impurezas e purificação do óleo do pré-sal. “Esses aditivos, inclusive, podem ser utilizados na purificação de água residual, gerada por empresas fabricantes de tinta, na despoluição de rios ou de esgotos urbanos”, acrescenta.

Modelo norueguês – Também defensor da exploração do pré-sal, o professor Ricardo Cabral de Azevedo, do Departamento de Engenharia de Minas e de Petróleo da Poli/USP, aconselha o Brasil a adotar o modelo da Noruega na extração do petróleo da camada pré-sal e evitar a chamada “doença holandesa”. “Outros países que tiveram grandes reservas a explorar e produzir são exemplos do que devemos ou não fazer no Brasil”, explica. “A Holanda, por exemplo, sofreu o que ficou sendo conhecido como ‘doença holandesa’, porque sua economia se tornou excessivamente dependente do petróleo. Já a Noruega se transformou radicalmente e hoje é um dos países com maior IDH [Índice de Desenvolvimento Humano] do mundo”, lembra.

Até então, a Noruega era um dos países mais pobres da Europa, cujas finanças dependiam principalmente de exportações de commodities, como minérios e peixes enlatados. A virada da economia norueguesa ocorreu a partir de 1969, quando foram descobertas grandes reservas de petróleo no Mar do Norte e a receita foi dirigida principalmente para saúde e educação. Hoje, esse país europeu detém a terceira maior renda per capita do mundo (US$ 59,3 mil) e o IDH mais alto do planeta.

Royalties para educação e CT&I – Assim, para fazer frente aos desafios que se apresentam na extração do petróleo na camada pré-sal no Brasil, os especialistas reforçam a necessidade de destinar parte significativa da receita dessa atividade para educação, ciência, tecnologia e inovação, seguindo o modelo norueguês. Aliás, essa é uma bandeira levantada pela comunidade científica, representada pela Sociedade Brasileira para o Progresso da Ciência (SBPC).

Os especialistas são unânimes em afirmar que o país precisa aproveitar as riquezas do pré-sal a fim de conquistar novos patamares de desenvolvimento, dar um salto na qualidade na educação e melhorar o capital humano – lembrando que um dia as reservas do petróleo acabarão. “Lembramos que são reservas muito grandes, mas finitas”, alerta Azevedo. “Cabe a nós transformá-las em um legado permanente, investindo na educação e no desenvolvimento do nosso país”, defende.

Já o diretor de tecnologia e inovação da Coppe/UFRJ, Estefen, acrescenta que o país precisa preparar o terreno, na área de pesquisas científicas e tecnológicas, para o período pós-petróleo. Nesse caso, ele considera fundamental assegurar investimentos para ampliar consideravelmente as pesquisas e estudos científicos para o desenvolvimento de tecnologias para produção de energias limpas e renováveis, lembrando que há um esforço de vários países em prol da redução de emissões em médio prazo. Vale destacar que o petróleo é um combustível fóssil que contribui significativamente para o aumento do efeito estufa.

Para o pesquisador da UFES, Castro, que considera positiva a proposta de criação do fundo do pré-sal (fundo soberano) – para o qual deve ser destinada metade da receita do óleo a ser extraído de águas ultraprofundas para educação – a exploração do pré-sal precisa ser inteligente, com responsabilidade ambiental e investimento em educação. “O petróleo traz muita riqueza, mas pode trazer, também, muita pobreza e muito dano ambiental”, lembra. “Por isso, a exploração tem de ser de forma inteligente, com responsabilidade ambiental e investimento em educação.” Hoje as riquezas do petróleo são distribuídas a estados, municípios e União por intermédio de royalties. Pela lei em vigor, os recursos devem ser investidos na parte social do país, “mas as prefeituras fazem mau uso dos recursos”, avalia.

Explorar o pré-sal requer esforços científicos e tecnológicos, considerando que os reservatórios estão a quase sete mil metros de profundidade a partir do nível do mar, com destaque para as Bacias de Santos (SP) e de Campos (RJ). Para fazer frente a esses desafios, Estefen diz que o país precisa mobilizar a comunidade científica nacional, seu conhecimento disponível, criar novos laboratórios, formar capital humano e gerar empregos de qualidade. “Extrair o petróleo do pré-sal vai demandar grande esforço tecnológico, esforços que vão ajudar o Brasil a conquistar novos patamares de desenvolvimento, futuramente”, diz. “Isto é, se usarmos bem os recursos do pré-sal, vamos educar as crianças, desenvolver a indústria, a ciência e a tecnologia. Se seguir tal receituário, o Brasil deverá se destacar no cenário internacional como um dos líderes tecnológicos, dentre os quais figuram Estados Unidos, Japão e países europeus”, conclui.

Pesquisadores analisam os custos ambientais da exploração profunda
Ao colocar na balança os benefícios que as riquezas do pré-sal podem proporcionar ao país e os eventuais custos ambientais, pesquisadores avaliam que o Brasil não pode renunciar à exploração do petróleo em águas profundas, unilateralmente, mesmo reconhecendo que a queima do petróleo contribui para o aquecimento global. Isso não significa que o processo de exploração do pré-sal desconsidere os danos ambientais.

O diretor de tecnologia e inovação da Coppe/UFRJ, Segen Estefen, insiste em dizer que todas as pesquisas em andamento vislumbram a proteção do meio ambiente, em uma tentativa de dar mais segurança às operações. “Não faz sentido o Brasil se beneficiar do petróleo por três ou quatro décadas, mas deixar o país em uma situação ruim para o meio ambiente”, explica.

Hoje os pesquisadores da Coppe, por exemplo, trabalham, simultaneamente, com assuntos ligados tanto à produção de petróleo, nos dias atuais, quanto a outras tecnologias que podem ser usadas na era “pós-petróleo”. Estudam, entre outros aspectos, a produção de eletricidade pelas ondas do mar – uma energia limpa e renovável – aproveitando a mesma estrutura montada e financiada pela indústria do petróleo para desenvolver conhecimento para o período pós-petróleo.

Para o especialista da Coppe/UFRJ, o Brasil não pode renunciar ao óleo do pré-sal porque essa “é uma riqueza importante para o Brasil” por ser uma fonte de energia competitiva. Dessa forma, ele acrescenta, a extração do pré-sal deverá render frutos positivos ao país. “No Brasil, ainda com tanta desigualdade, não podemos abdicar dessas riquezas”, diz. “Se não forem exploradas, talvez, daqui a 50 anos o preço do petróleo não valha metade dos valores atuais.” Por enquanto, Estefen acrescenta, não existe nenhum combustível capaz de substituir o petróleo e nem previsões para os próximos 20 anos, aproximadamente. Além disso, a demanda por essa energia tende a aumentar muito em função do aumento da população e da demanda de países, principalmente nos países asiáticos.

Demonstrando a mesma opinião, o professor Ricardo Cabral de Azevedo, do Departamento de Engenharia de Minas e de Petróleo da Escola Politécnica da Universidade de São Paulo (Poli/USP), considera ideal o país investir no conhecimento para substituir o uso do combustível fóssil, paulatinamente, em uma tentativa de minimizar os impactos ambientais. “O fato é que sempre haverá riscos, nessa ou em qualquer outra atividade, mas o ser humano ainda precisa do petróleo”, lembra. “Desse modo, o fundamental é procurarmos reduzi-los ao máximo. Aí também as experiências do passado são fundamentais, para aprendermos com os erros já cometidos.”

O eventual retorno socioeconômico proporcionado pela exploração de petróleo na camada pré-sal compensam os riscos ambientais, na observação do pesquisador e professor Eustáquio Vinícius de Castro, do Laboratório de Petróleo da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo (UFES). “Compensam desde que as coisas aconteçam de forma inteligente e sustentável e com racionalidade no processo de produção”, diz. ” Hoje, as empresas petrolíferas, que no passado foram mais poluentes, adotam mais segurança no processo de extração do petróleo, mesmo que alguns problemas aconteçam de vez em quando”.

Dimensão – O petróleo na camada pré-sal ocupa, aproximadamente, uma área de 800 km de comprimento por 200 km de largura, acompanhando a linha do litoral sudeste brasileiro. Segundo dados da Petrobras, desde 2006, foram perfurados mais de 80 poços, tanto na Bacia de Santos quanto na de Campos, com índice “de sucesso exploratório” acima de 80%. A estimativa é de que outras 19 novas plataformas entrem em operação até 2016; e outras 19 entrem em atividade até 2020. Segundo dados de suas assessoria de imprensa, a companhia petrolífera, líder na exploração do pré-sal, encomendou ainda 21 plataformas de produção e 28 sondas de exploração marítima a serem construídas até 2020 no País, além de 49 navios-tanque e centenas de barcos de apoio e serviços offshore.

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