Arquivo da categoria: Uncategorized

Galinhas enxergam as cores bem melhor do que os humanos (Folha de S.Paulo)

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RICARDO MIOTO

EDITOR DE “CIÊNCIA” E “SAÚDE”

30/03/2015  02h00

Galinhas são animais de visão, diz a ciência. Perto delas, somos uns daltônicos.

Cientistas descobriram que suas retinas têm cinco cones sensíveis à cor. Humanos têm só três, que enxergam comprimentos de vermelho, azul e verde –o resto é mistura. Galinhas nos superam com um cone para violeta e alguns comprimentos ultravioleta e com um quinto receptor, ainda pouco compreendido.

Tatiane Rosa/Folhapress
Galinha da Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária e Zootecnia da USP, no campus de Pirassununga
Galinha da Faculdade de Medicina Veterinária e Zootecnia da USP, no campus de Pirassununga

Além disso, no ano passado cientistas de Princeton (EUA) mostraram que os átomos do olho da galinha se organizam num estado da matéria inédito na biologia, com propriedades tanto de cristal sólido quanto de líquido. Tal arranjo permite que cores sejam recebidas de forma muito nítida.

Foi assim que o olho da galinha foi parar na revista científica “Physical Review”, entre artigos sobre temas da física como dissipação de energia ou mecânica quântica.

Isso tudo faz com que seja difícil imaginarmos como uma galinha vê cores –só sabemos que é bem mais intenso e, digamos, psicodélico.

Por que a evolução deixou o olho da galinha assim? É uma boa pergunta. As respostas passam pela importância das cores para ela –pense, por exemplo, na plumagem colorida dos parceiros sexuais.

On Reverse Engineering (Anthropology and Algorithms)

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Nick Seaver on Jan 27, 2014

Looking for the cultural work of engineers

The Atlantic welcomed 2014 with a major feature on web behemoth Netflix. If you didn’t know, Netflix has developed a system for tagging movies and for assembling those tags into phrases that look like hyper-specific genre names: Visually-striking Foreign Nostalgic Dramas, Critically-acclaimed Emotional Underdog Movies, Romantic Chinese Crime Movies, and so on. The sometimes absurd specificity of these names (or “altgenres,” as Netflix calls them) is one of the peculiar pleasures of the contemporary web, recalling the early days of website directories and Usenet newsgroups, when it seemed like the internet would be a grand hotel, providing a room for any conceivable niche.

Netflix’s weird genres piqued the interest of Atlantic editor Alexis Madrigal, who set about scraping the whole list. Working from the US in late 2013, his scraper bot turned up a startling 76,897 genre names — clearly the emanations of some unseen algorithmic force. How were they produced? What was their generative logic? What made them so good—plausible, specific, with some inexpressible touch of the human? Pursuing these mysteries brought Madrigal to the world of corpus analysis software and eventually to Netflix’s Silicon Valley offices.

The resulting article is an exemplary piece of contemporary web journalism — a collaboratively produced, tech-savvy 5,000-word “long read” that is both an exposé of one of the largest internet companies (by volume) and a reflection on what it is like to be human with machines. It is supported by a very entertaining altgenre-generating widget, built by professor and software carpenter Ian Bogost and illustrated by Twitter mystery darth. Madrigal pieces the story together with his signature curiosity and enthusiasm, and the result feels so now that future corpus analysts will be able to use it as a model to identify texts written in the United States from 2013–14. You really should read it.

A Māori eel trap. The design and construction of traps (or filters) like this are classic topics of interest for anthropologists of technology. cc-by-sa-3.0

As a cultural anthropologist in the middle of a long-term research project on algorithmic filtering systems, I am very interested in how people think about companies like Netflix, which take engineering practices and apply them to cultural materials. In the popular imagination, these do not go well together: engineering is about universalizable things like effectiveness, rationality, and algorithms, while culture is about subjective and particular things, like taste, creativity, and artistic expression. Technology and culture, we suppose, make an uneasy mix. When Felix Salmon, in his response to Madrigal’s feature, complains about “the systematization of the ineffable,” he is drawing on this common sense: engineers who try to wrangle with culture inevitably botch it up.

Yet, in spite of their reputations, we always seem to find technology and culture intertwined. The culturally-oriented engineering of companies like Netflix is a quite explicit case, but there are many others. Movies, for example, are a cultural form dependent on a complicated system of technical devices — cameras, editing equipment, distribution systems, and so on. Technologies that seem strictly practical — like the Māori eel trap pictured above—are influenced by ideas about effectiveness, desired outcomes, and interpretations of the natural world, all of which vary cross-culturally. We may talk about technology and culture as though they were independent domains, but in practice, they never stay where they belong. Technology’s straightforwardness and culture’s contingency bleed into each other.

This can make it hard to talk about what happens when engineers take on cultural objects. We might suppose that it is a kind of invasion: The rationalizers and quantifiers are over the ridge! They’re coming for our sensitive expressions of the human condition! But if technology and culture are already mixed up with each other, then this doesn’t make much sense. Aren’t the rationalizers expressing their own cultural ideas? Aren’t our sensitive expressions dependent on our tools? In the present moment, as companies like Netflix proliferate, stories trying to make sense of the relationship between culture and technology also proliferate. In my own research, I examine these stories, as told by people from a variety of positions relative to the technology in question. There are many such stories, and they can have far-reaching consequences for how technical systems are designed, built, evaluated, and understood.

The story Madrigal tells in The Atlantic is framed in terms of “reverse engineering.” The engineers of Netflix have not invaded cultural turf — they’ve reverse engineered it and figured out how it works. To report on this reverse engineering, Madrigal has done some of his own, trying to figure out the organizing principles behind the altgenre system. So, we have two uses of reverse engineering here: first, it is a way to describe what engineers do to cultural stuff; second, it is a way to figure out what engineers do.

So what does “reverse engineering” mean? What kind of things can be reverse engineered? What assumptions does reverse engineering make about its objects? Like any frame, reverse engineering constrains as well as enables the presentation of certain stories. I want to suggest here that, while reverse engineering might be a useful strategy for figuring out how an existing technology works, it is less useful for telling us how it came to work that way. Because reverse engineering starts from a finished technical object, it misses the accidents that happened along the way — the abandoned paths, the unusual stories behind features that made it to release, moments of interpretation, arbitrary choice, and failure. Decisions that seemed rather uncertain and subjective as they were being made come to appear necessary in retrospect. Engineering looks a lot different in reverse.

This is especially evident in the case of explicitly cultural technologies. Where “technology” brings to mind optimization, functionality, and necessity, “culture” seems to represent the opposite: variety, interpretation, and arbitrariness. Because it works from a narrowly technical view of what engineering entails, reverse engineering has a hard time telling us about the cultural work of engineers. It is telling that the word “culture” never appears in this piece about the contemporary state of the culture industry.

Inspired by Madrigal’s article, here are some notes on the consequences of reverse engineering for how we think about the cultural lives of engineers. As culture and technology continue to escape their designated places and intertwine, we need ways to talk about them that don’t assume they can be cleanly separated.

Ben Affleck, fact extractor.

There is a terrible movie about reverse engineering, based on a short story by Philip K. Dick. It is called Paycheck, stars Ben Affleck, and is not currently available for streaming on Netflix. In it, Affleck plays a professional reverse engineer (the “best in the business”), who is hired by companies to figure out the secrets of their competitors. After doing this, his memory of the experience is wiped and in return, he is compensated very well. Affleck is a sort of intellectual property conduit: he extracts secrets from devices, and having moved those secrets from one company to another, they are then extracted from him. As you might expect, things go wrong: Affleck wakes up one day to find that he has forfeited his payment in exchange for an envelope of apparently worthless trinkets and, even worse, his erstwhile employer now wants to kill him. The trinkets turn out to be important in unexpected ways as Affleck tries to recover the facts that have been stricken from his memory. The movie’s tagline is “Remember the Future”—you get the idea.

Paycheck illustrates a very popular way of thinking about engineering knowledge. To know about something is to know the facts about how it works. These facts are like physical objects — they can be hidden (inside of technologies, corporations, envelopes, or brains), and they can be retrieved and moved around. In this way of thinking about knowledge, facts that we don’t yet know are typically hidden on the other side of some barrier. To know through reverse engineering is to know by trying to pull those pre-existing facts out.

This is why reverse engineering is sometimes used as a metaphor in the sciences to talk about revealing the secrets of Nature. When biologists “reverse engineer” a cell, for example, they are trying to uncover its hidden functional principles. This kind of work is often described as “pulling back the curtain” on nature (or, in older times, as undressing a sexualized, female Nature — the kind of thing we in academia like to call “problematic”). Nature, if she were a person, holds the secrets her reverse engineers want.

In the more conventional sense of the term, reverse engineering is concerned with uncovering secrets held by engineers. Unlike its use in the natural sciences, here reverse engineering presupposes that someone already knows what we want to find out. Accessing this kind of information is often described as “pulling back the curtain” on a company. (This is likely the unfortunate naming logic behind Kimono, a new service for scraping websites and automatically generating APIs to access the scraped data.) Reverse engineering is not concerned with producing “new” knowledge, but with extracting facts from one place and relocating them to another.

Reverse engineering (and I guess this is obvious) is concerned with finished technologies, so it presumes that there is a straightforward fact of the matter to be worked out. Something happened to Ben Affleck before his memory was wiped, and eventually he will figure it out. This is not Rashomon, which suggests there might be multiple interpretations of the same event (although that isn’t available for streaming either). The problem is that this narrow scope doesn’t capture everything we might care about: why this technology and not another one? If a technology is constantly changing, like the algorithms and data structures under the hood at Netflix, then why is it changing as it does? Reverse engineering, at best, can only tell you the what, not the why or the how. But it even has some trouble with the what.

“Fantastic powers at his command / And I’m sure that he will understand / He’s the Wiz and he lives in Oz”

Netflix, like most companies today, is surrounded by a curtain of non-disclosure agreements and intellectual property protections. This curtain animates Madrigal’s piece, hiding the secrets that his reverse engineering is aimed at. For people inside the curtain, nothing in his article is news. What is newsworthy, Madrigal writes, is that “no one outside the company has ever assembled this data before.” The existence of the curtain shapes what we imagine knowledge about Netflix to be: something possessed by people on the inside and lacked by people on the outside.

So, when Madrigal’s reverse engineering runs out of steam, the climax of the story comes and the curtain is pulled back to reveal the “Wizard of Oz, the man who made the machine”: Netflix’s VP of Product Innovation Todd Yellin. Here is the guy who holds the secrets behind the altgenres, the guy with the knowledge about how Netflix has tried to bridge the world of engineering and the world of cultural production. According to the logic of reverse engineering, Yellin should be able to tell us everything we want to know.

From Yellin, Madrigal learns about the extensiveness of the tagging that happens behind the curtain. He learns some things that he can’t share publicly, and he learns of the existence of even more secrets — the contents of the training manual which dictate how movies are to be entered into the system. But when it comes to how that massive data and intelligence infrastructure was put together, he learns this:

“It’s a real combination: machine-learned, algorithms, algorithmic syntax,” Yellin said, “and also a bunch of geeks who love this stuff going deep.”

This sentence says little more than “we did it with computers,” and it illustrates a problem for the reverse engineer: there is always another curtain to get behind. Scraping altgenres will only get you so far, and even when you get “behind the curtain,” companies like Netflix are only willing to sketch out their technical infrastructure in broad strokes. In more technically oriented venues or the academic research community, you may learn more, but you will never get all the way to the bottom of things. The Wizard of Oz always holds on to his best secrets.

But not everything we want to know is a trade secret. While reverse engineers may be frustrated by the first part of Yellin’s sentence — the vagueness of “algorithms, algorithmic syntax” — it’s the second part that hides the encounter between culture and technology: What does it look like when “geeks who love this stuff go deep”? How do the people who make the algorithms understand the “deepness” of cultural stuff? How do the loves of geeks inform the work of geeks? The answers to these questions are not hidden away as proprietary technical information; they’re often evident in the ways engineers talk about and work with their objects. But because reverse engineering focuses narrowly on revealing technical secrets, it fails to piece together how engineers imagine and engage with culture. For those of us interested in the cultural ramifications of algorithmic filtering, these imaginings and engagements—not usually secret, but often hard to access — are more consequential than the specifics of implementation, which are kept secret and frequently change.

“My first goal was: tear apart content!”

While Yellin may not have told us enough about the technical secrets of Netflix to create a competitor, he has given us some interesting insights into the way he thinks about movies and how to understand them. If you’re familiar with research on algorithmic recommenders, you’ll recognize the system he describes as an example of content-based recommendation. Where “classic” recommender systems rely on patterns in ratings data and have little need for other information, content-based systems try to understand the material they recommend, through various forms of human or algorithmic analysis. These analyses are a lot of work, but over the past decade, with the increasing availability of data and analytical tools, content-based recommendation has become more popular. Most big recommender systems today (including Netflix’s) are hybrids, drawing on both user ratings and data about the content of recommended items.

The “reverse engineering of Hollywood” is the content side of things: Netflix’s effort to parse movies into its database so that they can be recommended based on their content. By calling this parsing “reverse engineering,” Madrigal implies that there is a singular fact of the matter to be retrieved from these movies, and as a result, he focuses his description on Netflix’s thoroughness. What is tagged? “Everything. Everyone.” But the kind of parsing Yellin describes is not the only way to understand cultural objects; rather, it is a specific and recognizable mode of interpretation. It bears a strong resemblance to structuralism — a style of cultural analysis that had its heyday in the humanities and social sciences during the mid-20th century.

Structuralism, according to Roland Barthes, is a way of interpreting objects by decomposing them into parts and then recomposing those parts into new wholes. By breaking a text apart and putting it back together, the structuralist aims to understand its underlying structure: what order lurks under the surface of apparently idiosyncratic objects?

For example, the arch-structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss took such an approach in his study of myth. Take the Oedipus myth: there are many different ways to tell the same basic story, in which a baby is abandoned in the wilderness and then grows up to unknowingly kill his father, marry his mother, and blind himself when he finds out (among other things). But, across different tellings of the myth, there is a fairly persistent set of elements that make up the story. Lévi-Strauss called these elements “mythemes” (after linguistic “phonemes”). By breaking myths down into their constituent parts, you could see patterns that linked them together, not only across different tellings of the “same” myth, but even across apparently disparate myths from other cultures. Through decomposition and recomposition, structuralists sought what Barthes called the object’s “rules of functioning.” These rules, governing the combination of mythemes, were the object of Lévi-Strauss’s cultural analysis.

Todd Yellin is, by all appearances, a structuralist. He tells Madrigal that his goal was to “tear apart content” and create a “Netflix Quantum Theory,” under which movies could be broken down into their constituent parts — into “quanta” or the “little ‘packets of energy’ that compose each movie.” Those quanta eventually became “microtags,” which Madrigal tells us are used to describe everything in the movie. Large teams of human taggers are trained, using a 36-page secret manual, and they go to town, decomposing movies into microtags. Take those tags, recompose them, and you get the altgenres, a weird sort of structuralist production intended to help you find things in Netflix’s pool of movies. If Lévi-Strauss had lived to be 104 instead of just 100, he might have had some thoughts about this computerized structuralism: in his 1955 article on the structural study of myth, he suggested that further advances would require mathematicians and “I.B.M. equipment” to handle the complicated analysis. Structuralism and computers go way back.

Although structuralism sounds like a fairly technical way to analyze cultural material, it is not, strictly speaking, objective. When you break an object down into its parts and put it back together again, you have not simply copied it — you’ve made something new. A movie’s set of microtags, no matter how fine-grained, is not the same thing as the movie. It is, as Barthes writes, a “directed, interested simulacrum” of the movie, a re-creation made with particular goals in mind. If you had different goals — different ideas about what the significant parts of movies were, different imagined use-cases — you might decompose differently. There is more than one way to tear apart content.

This does not jive well with common sense ideas about what engineering is like. Instead of the cold, rational pursuit of optimal solutions, we have something a little more creative. We have options, a variety of choices which are all potentially valid, depending on a range of contextual factors not exhausted by obviously “technical” concerns. Barthes suggested that composing a structuralist analysis was like composing a poem, and engineering is likewise expressive. Netflix’s altgenres are in no way the final statement on the movies. They are, rather, one statement among many — a cultural production in their own right, influenced by local assumptions about meaning, relevance, and taste. “Reverse engineering” seems a poor name for this creative practice, because it implies a singular right answer — a fact of the matter that merely needs to be retrieved from the insides of the movies. We might instead, more accurately, call this work “interpretation.”

So, where does this leave us with reverse engineering? There are two questions at issue here:

  1. Does “reverse engineering” as a term adequately describe the work that engineers like those employed at Netflix do when they interact with cultural objects?
  2. Is reverse engineering a useful strategy for figuring out what engineers do?

The answer to both of these questions, I think, is a measured “no,” and for the same reason: reverse engineering, as both a descriptor and a research strategy, misses the things engineers do that do not fit into conventional ideas about engineering. In the ongoing mixture of culture and technology, reverse engineering sticks too closely to the idealized vision of technical work. Because it assumes engineers care strictly about functionality and efficiency, it is not very good at telling stories about accidents, interpretations, and arbitrary choices. It assumes that cultural objects or practices (like movies or engineering) can be reduced to singular, universally-intelligible logics. It takes corporate spokespeople at their word when they claim that there was a straight line from conception to execution.

As Nicholas Diakopoulos has written, reverse engineering can be a useful way to figure out what obscured technologies do, but it cannot get us answers to “the question of why.” As these obscured technologies — search engines, recommender systems, and other algorithmic filters — are constantly refined, we need better ways to talk about the whys and hows of engineering as a practice, not only the what of engineered objects that immediately change.

The risk of reverse engineering is that we come to imagine that the only things worth knowing about companies like Netflix are the technical details hidden behind the curtain. In my own research, I argue that the cultural lives and imaginations of the people behind the curtain are as important, if not more, for understanding how these systems come to exist and function as they do. Moreover, these details are not generally considered corporate secrets, so they are accessible if we look for them. Not everything worth knowing has been actively hidden, and transparency can conceal as much as it reveals.

All engineering mixes culture and technology. Even Madrigal’s “reverse engineering” does not stay put in technical bounds: he supplements the work of his bot by talking with people, drawing on their interpretations and offering his own, reading the altgenres, populated with serendipitous algorithmic accidents, as “a window unto the American soul.” Engineers, reverse and otherwise, have cultural lives, and these lives inform their technical work. To see these effects, we need to get beyond the idea that the technical and the cultural are necessarily distinct. But if we want to understand the work of companies like Netflix, it is not enough to simply conclude that culture and technology — humans and computers — are mixed. The question we need to answer is how.

Colombian tribe scores ‘historic’ victory versus Big Gas (The Guardian)

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State company Ecopetrol pulls out of drilling site in territories belonging to the indigenous U’wa people

U'was in north-east Colombia protesting against operations by state oil and gas company Ecopetrol.

U’was in north-east Colombia protesting against operations by state oil and gas company Ecopetrol. Photograph: Asou’wa/Asou’wa

Thursday 26 March 2015 14.31 GMT / Last modified on Thursday 26 March 2015 14.36 GMT

The indigenous U’wa people living in north-east Colombia have won what observers call an “historic” and “decisive” victory after state oil and gas company Ecopetrol dismantled a gas drilling site in their territories.

The U’wa Association of Traditional Authorities and Councils (Asou’wa) reported in February last year the arrival of an “avalanche of heavy machinery” and increasing numbers of soldiers at the site, called Magallanes, where Ecopetrol intended to drill three wells. After statements fiercely opposing operations and a series of meetings with government and company representatives, Ecopetrol agreed to suspend operations last May and announced a decision in July to withdraw equipment – but only finished doing so in January this year.

“It’s a triumph,” Asou’wa vice-president Heber Tegria Uncaria told the Guardian. “It’s one more battle we’ve won over the last 20 to 30 years, and it’s thanks to the U’wa people themselves, national and international support, and the role of the media in drawing people’s attention to what is happening.”

“We feel extremely happy about the Magallanes victory and it gives us strength to continue fighting for our lives, for our rights and for Mother Earth,” says U’wa lawyer Aura Tegria Cristancho. “Ecopetrol’s decision was a very intelligent one. It knows the U’was and knew we wouldn’t stop fighting.”

Asou’wa issued a statement calling Ecopetrol’s withdrawal an “act of respect” for U’wa rights and an “important achievement” in the defence of their territories, and acknowledging the importance of support from organisations and individuals working on human rights and environmental issues, particularly the US-based NGO Amazon Watch.

Andrew Miller, Amazon Watch’s advocacy director, describes Ecopetrol’s decision as a “decisive victory” and says it is “very significant” that “one of Latin America’s largest corporations” would dismantle a gas drilling site following pressure.

“I can’t say this is unprecedented, but we’ve never seen a similar circumstance in the last 20 years,” he says. “Once actual construction starts, it is extremely difficult to force corporations, especially one with the full backing of the state, to reverse course.”

Carlos Andres Baquero, a lawyer from Bogota-based Dejusticia, told the Guardian Ecopetrol’s decision was “historic.”

“It’s been several decades since the U’wa started their fight to protect their territory and although it has not been easy, the withdrawal from Magallanes is a testament to their strength and capacity to mobilise,” he says.

The United Nations’s Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, calls it an “important victory” for indigenous peoples in Colombia.

“Such victories are far too rare,” she told the Guardian. “Too often projects see indigenous peoples driven from their lands. I hope other corporations can draw lessons from these conflicts and obtain the free, prior, and informed consent of indigenous peoples before making use of their territories.”

Camila Mariño, a Colombian lawyer with Earthrights International, describes Ecopetrol’s decision as “in line” with the agreements made with the U’was last May, as well as recent commitments by the government – made during peace talks with Farc guerrillas in Cuba – to take human rights and indigenous communities fully into account.

Asked by the Guardian if it had pulled out of Magallanes because of U’wa opposition, Ecopetrol emailed a statement saying it had agreed to meet with them in June last year but they had failed to show up.

“Since this led to delays, Ecopetrol decided to remove the drilling equipment and facilities from the area, as has effectively happened,” the company states.

However, as Tegria Uncaria points out, Ecopetrol retains its environmental license to operate at Magallanes, and the company itself has called the suspension “temporary.” In correspondence last August Ecopetrol emphasised that suspension “didn’t imply a definite termination of the project”, and told the Guardian it “would like to continue exploring in the area, but respecting the U’wa nation and all the agreements made with them.”

The U’was have now taken legal action to have the environmental license annulled.

“We won the political battle, but the license remains in force,” says Tegria Uncaria.

The Magallanes site is roughly 270ms beyond the northern boundary of a 220,000 hectare reserve established for the U’was in 1999, but remains within their ancestral territories.

Asou’wa warns that, Magallanes aside, the U’was continue to face other serious threats. These include mining concessions in their reserve, the Cano Limon-Covenas oil pipeline which has been attacked 100s of times, and armed conflict between guerrillas, paramilitaries and the Colombian army.

The pipeline, owned by Cenit, an Ecopetrol subsidiary, mainly transports oil from the Cano Limon oil fields in which, says Ecopetrol, it has a 55% stake and US oil firm Occidental has 45%. According to Adam Isacson, from the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), some of the US’s multi-billion dollar “Plan Colombia” “aid” package – ostensibly about combating the drugs trade – has been spent on Colombian army brigades in this region in order to protect the pipeline, with the “bulk of it” going to “Black Hawk helicopters, pilot training, maintenance training, communications equipment and fuel sustenance.” According to a 2011 WOLA report co-authored by Isacson, “Plan Colombia” aid was delivered during a period of “severe human rights abuses” by security forces and paramilitary and army violence spiralling “tragically upwards”, while US officials, he says, “downplayed human rights groups’ constant warnings about military-paramilitary collaboration” and the “false positives” scandal in which Colombian soldiers dressed victims like guerrillas and claimed them killed during fighting.

“The military presence is far greater than it used to be, especially in that part of the pipeline [Arauca to Santander, through U’wa territories],” Isacson says. “Who really benefits? The oil companies getting free security would be the main ones, and all their investors. This is not designed to protect citizens.”

The U’was have repeatedly denounced the militarisation of their territories, and are now requesting that the pipeline is either buried or re-routed.

“Given the constant blowing-up of the pipeline and the environmental and human rights dangers this causes, we have requested that studies are done on the possibility of burying it underground between the points where it crosses our reserve, or finding another route outside the reserve,” says Tegria Uncaria. “To date, it hasn’t been buried, but according to Ecopetrol they’re doing technical studies.”

Ecopetrol told the Guardian that it was doing such studies and says “it is hoped they will be finished by the first half of 2015.”

In the 1990s the U’was issued a series of threats to commit mass suicide if operations went ahead at another drilling site in their territories, called Gibraltar, just to the east of Magallanes.

Climate denial is immoral, says head of US Episcopal church (The Guardian)

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Climate change is a moral challenge threatening the rights of the world’s poorest people and those who deny it are not using God’s gift of knowledge, says presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori

Episcopal presiding bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori has called climate denial a ‘blind’ position. Photograph: Ed Ou/AP

The highest ranking woman in the Anglican communion has said climate denial is a “blind” and immoral position which rejects God’s gift of knowledge.

Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal church and one of the most powerful women in Christianity, said that climate change was a moral imperative akin to that of the civil rights movement. She said it was already a threat to the livelihoods and survival of people in the developing world.

“It is in that sense much like the civil rights movement in this country where we are attending to the rights of all people and the rights of the earth to continue to be a flourishing place,” Bishop Jefferts Schori said in an interview with the Guardian. “It is certainly a moral issue in terms of the impacts on the poorest and most vulnerable around the world already.”

In the same context, Jefferts Schori attached moral implications to climate denial, suggesting those who reject the underlying science of climate change were turning their backs on God’s gift of knowledge.

“Episcopalians understand the life of the mind is a gift of God and to deny the best of current knowledge is not using the gifts God has given you,” she said. “In that sense, yes, it could be understood as a moral issue.”

She went on: “I think it is a very blind position. I think it is a refusal to use the best of human knowledge, which is ultimately a gift of God.”

The sense of urgency around the issue has been deepened by Pope Francis forceful statements on global warming, which he is expected to amplify in a papal encyclical in June and during an address to the US Congress in September.

The Episcopalian church will host a webcast on 24 March to kick off a month-long action campaign designed to encourage church members to reduce their own carbon footprints and lobby government and international corporations to fight climate change.

An oceanographer before she was ordained at the age of 40, Bishop Jefferts Schori said she hoped to use her visibility as a church leader to help drive action on climate change.

As presiding bishop, she oversees 2.5m members of the Episcopal church in 17 countries, and is arguably one of the most prominent women in Christianity. The two largest denominations in the US, Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists, do not ordain women.

“I really hope to motivate average Episcopalians to see the severity of this issue, the morality of this issue,” she said. “Turning the ship in another direction requires the consolidated efforts of many people who are moving in the same direction.”

She acknowledged that the challenge was deepened by the strain of climate denial in American politics, and by continued resistance to science in American classrooms.

“It’s hard work when you have a climate denier who will not see the reality of scientific truth,” she said.

However, she, like a number of church leaders, said they had seen an uptick in climate activism in recent months, spurred by the pope’s comments last January, and the conjunction later this year of United Nations conferences on development and climate change.

Evangelical churches – once seen as a conservative force – were now taking up the climate cause, largely because of growing awareness of its threat to the poor.

“One of the significant changes in particular has been the growing awareness and activism among the evangelical community who at least somewhat in the more distant past refused to encounter this issue, refused to deal with it,” Jeffers Schori said. “The major evangelical groups in this country have been much more forward in addressing this issue because they understand that it impacts the poor.”

A number of denominations have also joined the growing fossil fuel divestment movement which is encouraging organisations to move their investments out of coal, oil and gas companies. The United Methodist church, the third largest denomination, dumped coal companies from its pension fund.

The Unitarian church and the United church of Christ have also voted to divest, according to Reverent Fletcher Harper of Green Faith. And the World Council of Churches has pledged not to invest in fossil fuels. A number of individual congregations have also divested from fossil fuels.

The Guardian launched a campaign on Monday to encourage the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Wellcome Trust to divest from fossil fuels.

The Episcopal church has also come under pressure to withdraw its fossil fuel holdings. A number of diocese are pressing for divestment, and will bring the issue to a vote at the church’s annual convention this summer.

Jefferts Schori opposes fossil fuel divestment. “If you divest you lose any direct ability to influence the course of a corporation’s behavior,” she said. “I think most pragmatists realise that we can’t close the spigot on the oil wells and close the coal mines immediately without some other energy source to shift to.”

World Council of Churches rules out fossil fuel investments

Climate change: at last a breakthrough to our catastrophic political impasse? (The Guardian)

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Expecting the Paris talks to succeed is a pious hope: but the Oslo principles, launched today, argue that governments are already in flagrant breach of their legal obligations to the planet

climate change conference in peru 2014

‘The dismal pace of international negotiations is why the Guardian has thrown its weight behind a divestment campaign.’ The South Korea delegation are all smiles at the 2014 UN climate change conference in Peru, intended to produce a draft deal to be adopted in Paris in December. Photograph: Rodrigo Abd/AP

 and 

Monday 30 March 2015 16.34 BST / Last modified on Monday 30 March 2015 16.36 BST

Today a group of eminent jurists accuse governments and enterprises of being in clear and flagrant breach of their legal obligations on climate change – under human rights law, international law, environmental law, and tort law.

Human ravaging of our planet and climate through relentless fossil fuel extraction and greenhouse gas emissions is undoubtedly the defining existential challenge of our time. Our collective failure to commit to meaningful reductions in emissions is a political and moral travesty, with catastrophic implications, particularly for the poorest and most marginalised, domestically and globally.

The dismal pace of international negotiations – and the prospect of yet more disappointment at the UN Paris conference in December – is why the Guardian has thrown its weight behind a divestment campaign, pressurising moral investors to take a stand against those responsible for the greatest emissions. After all, two-thirds of all greenhouse emissions come from just 90 coal, oil and gas companies.

But in the Oslo Principles on Global Climate Change Obligations – launching in London today – a working group of current and ex-judges, advocates and professors, drawn from each region of the world, argue that any new international agreement will just be a coda to obligations already present, pressing and unavoidable in existing law.

What the Oslo principles offer is a solution to our infuriating impasse in which governments – especially those from developed nations, responsible for 70% of the world’s emissions between 1890 and 2007 – are in effect saying: “We all agree that something needs to be done, but we cannot agree on who has to do what and how much. In the absence of any such agreement, we have no obligation to do anything.” The Oslo principles bring a battery of legal arguments to dispute and disarm that second claim. In essence, the working group asserts that governments are violating their legal duties if they each act in a way that, collectively, is known to lead to grave harms.

Governments will retort that they cannot know their obligations to reduce emissions in the absence of an international agreement. The working group’s response is that they can know this, already, and with sufficient precision.

There is a clear answer to the question of each country’s reasonable share, based on a permissible quantum of emissions per capita that never threatens the perilous 2C mean temperature increase that would profoundly and irreversibly affect all life on earth. This reasonable share is what nations owe on the basis of their common but differentiated responsibilities for contributing to climate change. The Oslo principles duly incorporate mechanisms to accommodate the differential impacts and demands on nations and enterprises, particularly in the least developed countries.

Backed by distinguished international lawyers, professors and judges, the principles are a template for courts, advocates and lawmakers to act swiftly, embodying the urgency, conviction and black-letter reasoning required if humanity is to turn the corner before it is too late.

The document is the product of an independent, rigorous, multi-year effort led by Yale University’s Professor Thomas Pogge, and Jaap Spier, the advocate-general of the Netherlands supreme court. It is championed by, among others, Antonio Benjamin, the Brazilian high court justice; Michael Kirby, a former Australian high court justice; Dinah Shelton, a former president of the inter-American commission on human rights; and Elisabeth Steiner, a judge at the European court of human rights.

These principles deserve detailed consideration by lawyers, scientists, advocates and – critically – the policymakers engaged in last-ditch negotiations in Paris in December to divert us from the path towards climate catastrophe. They provide some opinio juris that allows judges to prohibit conduct that, practised by many or all states, will cause enormous damage to people and the planet.

But the working group’s core message is that we simply cannot wait in the pious hope that short-term-minded governments and enterprises will save us; and that when we act it must be on the basis of equity and justice, according to law. Every year that we miss increases the challenge and risk. We’ve squandered decades already, and our window for action is closing. We must act now.

The Anthropocene Myth (Jacobin)

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30.3.2015

Blaming all of humanity for climate change lets capitalism off the hook.

by Andreas Malm

A coal-cleaning plant near Pittsburgh. John Collier / Library of Congress

A coal-cleaning plant near Pittsburgh. John Collier / Library of Congress

Last year was the hottest year ever recorded. And yet, the latest figures show that in 2013 the source that provided the most new energy to the world economy wasn’t solar, wind power, or even natural gas or oil, but coal.

The growth in global emissions — from 1 percent a year in the 1990s to 3 percent so far this millennium — is striking. It’s an increase that’s paralleled our growing knowledge of the terrible consequences of fossil fuel usage.

Who’s driving us toward disaster? A radical answer would be the reliance of capitalists on the extraction and use of fossil energy. Some, however, would rather identify other culprits.

The earth has now, we are told, entered “the Anthropocene”: the epoch of humanity. Enormously popular — and accepted even by many Marxist scholars — the Anthropocene concept suggests that humankind is the new geological force transforming the planet beyond recognition, chiefly by burning prodigious amounts of coal, oil, and natural gas.

According to these scholars, such degradation is the result of humans acting out their innate predispositions, the inescapable fate for a planet subjected to humanity’s “business-as-usual.” Indeed, the proponents cannot argue otherwise, for if the dynamics were of a more contingent character, the narrative of an entire species ascending to biospheric supremacy would be difficult to defend.

Their story centers on a classic element: fire. The human species alone can manipulate fire, and therefore it is the one that destroys the climate; when our ancestors learned how to set things ablaze, they lit the fuse of business-as-usual. Here, write prominent climate scientists Michael Raupach and Josep Canadell, was “the essential evolutionary trigger for the Anthropocene,” taking humanity straight to “the discovery that energy could be derived not only from detrital biotic carbon but also from detrital fossil carbon, at first from coal.”

The “primary reason” for current combustion of fossil fuels is that “long before the industrial era, a particular primate species learned how to tap the energy reserves stored in detrital carbon.” My learning to walk at the age of one is the reason for me dancing salsa today; when humanity ignited its first dead tree, it could only lead, one million years later, to burning a barrel of oil.

Or, in the words of Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill: “The mastery of fire by our ancestors provided humankind with a powerful monopolistic tool unavailable to other species, that put us firmly on the long path towards the Anthropocene.” In this narrative, the fossil economy is the creation precisely of humankind, or “the fire-ape, Homo pyrophilus,” as in Mark Lynas’s popularization of Anthropocene thinking, aptly titled The God Species.

Now, the ability to manipulate fire was surely a necessary condition for the commencement of large-scale fossil fuel combustion in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Was it also the cause of it?

The important thing to note here is the logical structure of the Anthropocene narrative: some universal trait of the species must be driving the geological epoch that is its own, or else it would be a matter of some subset of the species. But the story of human nature can come in many forms, both in the Anthropocene genre and in other parts of climate change discourse.

In an essay in the anthology Engaging with Climate Change, psychoanalyst John Keene offers an original explanation for why humans pollute the planet and refuse to stop. In infancy, the human being discharges waste matter without limits and learns that the caring mother will take away the poo and the wee and clean up the crotch.

As a result, human beings are accustomed to the practice of spoiling their surroundings: “I believe that these repeated encounters contribute to the complementary belief that the planet is an unlimited ‘toilet-mother’, capable of absorbing our toxic products to infinity.”

But where is the evidence for any sort of causal connection between fossil fuel combustion and infant defecation? What about all those generations of people who, up to the nineteenth century, mastered both arts but never voided the carbon deposits of the earth and dumped them into the atmosphere: were they shitters and burners just waiting to realize their full potentials?

It’s easy to poke fun at certain forms of psychoanalysis, but attempts to attribute business-as-usual to the properties of the human species are doomed to vacuity. That which exists always and everywhere cannot explain why a society diverges from all others and develop something new – such as the fossil economy that only emerged some two centuries ago but now has become so entrenched that we recognize it as the only ways human can produce.

As it happens, however, mainstream climate discourse is positively drenched in references to humanity as such, human nature, the human enterprise, humankind as one big villain driving the train. In The God Species, we read: “God’s power is now increasingly being exercised by us. We are the creators of life, but we are also its destroyers.” This is one of the most common tropes in the discourse: we, all of us, you and I, have created this mess together and make it worse each day.

Enter Naomi Klein, who in This Changes Everything expertly lays bare the myriad ways in which capital accumulation, in general, and its neoliberal variant, in particular, pour fuel on the fire now consuming the earth system. Giving short shrift to all the talk of a universal human evildoer, she writes, “We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe — and would benefit the vast majority — are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”

So how do the critics respond? “Klein describes the climate crisis as a confrontation between capitalism and the planet,” philosopher John Gray counters in the Guardian. “It would be be more accurate to describe the crisis as a clash between the expanding demands of humankind and a finite world.”

Gray isn’t alone. This schism is emerging as the great ideological divide in the climate debate, and proponents of the mainstream consensus are fighting back.

In the London Review of Books, Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer who has long argued that the environmental movement should disband and accept total collapse as our destiny, retorts: “Climate change isn’t something that a small group of baddies has foisted on us”; “in the end, we are all implicated.” This, Kingsnorth argues, “is a less palatable message than one which sees a brutal 1 per cent screwing the planet and a noble 99 per cent opposing them, but it is closer to reality.”

Is it closer to reality? Six simple facts demonstrate the opposite.

First, the steam engine is widely, and correctly, seen as the original locomotive of business-as-usual, by which the combustion of coal was first linked to the ever-expanding spiral of capitalist commodity production.

While it is admittedly banal to point out, steam engines were not adopted by some natural-born deputies of the human species. The choice of a prime mover in commodity production could not possibly have been the prerogative of that species, since it presupposed, for a start, the institution of wage labor. It was the owners of the means of production who installed the novel prime mover. A tiny minority even in Britain — all-male, all-white — this class of people comprised an infinitesimal fraction of humanity in the early nineteenth century.

Second, when British imperialists penetrated into northern India around the same time, they stumbled on coal seams that were, to their great amazement, already known to the natives — indeed, the Indians had the basic knowledge of how to dig, burn, and generate heat from coal. And yet they cared nothing for the fuel.

The British, on the other hand, desperately wanted the coal out of the ground — to propel the steamboats by which they transported the treasure and raw materials extracted from the Indian peasants towards the metropolis, and their own surplus of cotton goods towards the inland markets. The problem was, no workers volunteered to step into the mines. Hence the British had to organize a system of indentured labor, forcing farmers into the pits so as to acquire the fuel for the exploitation of India.

Third, most of the twenty-first century emissions explosion originates from the People’s Republic of China. The driver of that explosion is apparent: it is not the growth of the Chinese population, nor its household consumption, nor its public expenditures, but the tremendous expansion of manufacturing industry, implanted in China by foreign capital to extract surplus value out of local labor, perceived around the turn of the millennium as extraordinarily cheap and disciplined.

That shift was part of a global assault on wages and working conditions — workers all over the world being weighed down by the threat of capital’s relocation to their Chinese substitutes, who could only be exploited by means of fossil energy as a necessary material substratum. The ensuing emissions explosion is the atmospheric legacy of class warfare.

Fourth, there is probably no other industry that encounters so much popular opposition wherever it wants to set up shop as the oil and gas industry. As Klein chronicles so well, local communities are in revolt against fracking and pipelines and exploration from Alaska to the Niger Delta, from Greece to Ecuador. But against them stands an interest recently expressed with exemplary clarity by Rex Tillerson, president and CEO of ExxonMobil: “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do.” This is the spirit of fossil capital incarnate.

Fifth, advanced capitalist states continue relentlessly to enlarge and deepen their fossil infrastructures — building new highways, new airports, new coal-fired power-plants — always attuned to the interests of capital, hardly ever consulting their people on these matters. Only the truly blind intellectual, of the Paul Kingsnorth-type, can believe that “we are all implicated” in such policies.

How many Americans are involved in the decisions to give coal a larger share in the electric power sector, so that the carbon intensity of the US economy rose in 2013? How many Swedes should be blamed for the ramming through of a new highway around Stockholm — the greatest infrastructure project in modern Swedish history — or their government’s assistance to coal power plants in South Africa?

The most extreme illusions about the perfect democracy of the market are required to maintain the notion of “us all” driving the train.

Sixth, and perhaps most obvious: few resources are so unequally consumed as energy. The 19 million inhabitants of New York State alone consume more energy than the 900 million inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa. The difference in energy consumption between a subsistence pastoralist in the Sahel and an average Canadian may easily be larger than 1,000-fold — and that is an average Canadian, not the owner of five houses, three SUVs, and a private airplane.

A single average US citizen emits more than 500 citizens of Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, or Burundi; how much an average US millionaire emits — and how much more than an average US or Cambodian worker — remains to be counted. But a person’s imprint on the atmosphere varies tremendously depending on where she is born. Humanity, as a result, is far too slender an abstraction to carry the burden of culpability.

Ours is the geological epoch not of humanity, but of capital. Of course, a fossil economy does not necessarily have to be capitalist: the Soviet Union and its satellite states had their own growth mechanisms connected to coal, oil, and gas. They were no less dirty, sooty, or emissions-intensive — perhaps rather more — than their Cold War adversaries. So why focus on capital? What reason is there to delve into the destructiveness of capital, when the Communist states performed at least as abysmally?

In medicine, a similar question would perhaps be, why concentrate research efforts on cancer rather than smallpox? Both can be fatal! But only one still exists. History has closed the parenthesis around the Soviet system, and so we are back at the beginning, where the fossil economy is coextensive with the capitalist mode of production — only now on a global scale.

The Stalinist version deserves its own investigations, and on its own terms (the mechanisms of growth being of their own kind). But we do not live in the Vorkuta coal-mining gulag of the 1930s. Our ecological reality, encompassing us all, is the world founded by steam-powered capital, and there are alternative courses that an environmentally responsible socialism could take. Hence capital, not humanity as such.

Naomi Klein’s success and recent street mobilizations notwithstanding, this remains a fringe view. Climate science, politics, and discourse are constantly couched in the Anthropocene narrative: species-thinking, humanity-bashing, undifferentiated collective self-flagellation, appeal to the general population of consumers to mend their ways and other ideological pirouettes that only serve to conceal the driver.

To portray certain social relations as the natural properties of the species is nothing new. Dehistoricizing, universalizing, eternalizing, and naturalizing a mode of production specific to a certain time and place — these are the classic strategies of ideological legitimation.

They block off any prospect for change. If business-as-usual is the outcome of human nature, how can we even imagine something different? It is perfectly logical that advocates of the Anthropocene and associated ways of thinking either champion false solutions that steer clear of challenging fossil capital — such as geoengineering in the case of Mark Lynas and Paul Crutzen, the inventor of the Anthropocene concept — or preach defeat and despair, as in the case of Kingsnorth.

According to the latter, “it is now clear that stopping climate change is impossible” — and, by the way, building a wind farm is just as bad as opening another coal mine, for both desecrate the landscape.

Without antagonism, there can never be any change in human societies. Species-thinking on climate change only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is.

‘Technological Disobedience’: How Cubans Manipulate Everyday Technologies For Survival (WLRN)

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12:05  PM

MON JULY 1, 2013

By DANIEL RIVERO

In Cuban Spanish, there is a word for overcoming great obstacles with minimal resources: resolver.

Literally, it means to resolve, but to many Cubans on the island and living in South Florida, resolviendo is an enlightened reality born of necessity.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba entered a “Special Period in Times of Peace”, which saw unprecedented shortages of every day items. Previously, the Soviets had been Cuba’s principal traders, sending goods for low prices and buying staple export commodities like sugar at above market prices.

Rationing goods was a normal part of life for a long time, but Cubans found themselves in dire straights without Soviet support. As the crisis got worse and worse over time, the more creative people would have to get.

Verde Olivo, the publishing house for the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces, published a largely crowdsourced book shortly after the Special Period began. Titled Con Nuestros Propios Esfuerzos (With Our Own Efforts), the book detailed all the possible ways that household items could be manipulated and turned inside out in order to fulfill the needs of a starving population.

Included in the book is a famous recipe for turning grapefruit rind into makeshift beef steak (after heavy seasoning).

Cuban artist and designer Ernesto Oroza watched with amazement as uses sprang from everyday items, and he soon began collecting these items from this sad but ingeniously creative period of Cuban history.

A Cuban rikimbili-- the word for bicycles that have been converted into motorcycles. The engine of 100cc's or less typically is constructed out of motor-powered, misting backpacks or Russian tank AC generators.

A Cuban rikimbili– the word for bicycles that have been converted into motorcycles. The engine of 100cc’s or less typically is constructed out of motor-powered, misting backpacks or Russian tank AC generators. Credit rikimbili.com

“People think beyond the normal capacities of an object, and try to surpass the limitations that it imposes on itself”, Oraza explains in a recently published Motherboard documentary that originally aired in 2011.

Oraza coined the phrase “Technological Disobedience”, which he says summarizes how Cubans reacted to technology during this time.

After graduating from design school to an abysmal economy, Oraza and a friend began to travel the island and collect these unique items from every province.

These post-apocalyptic contraptions reflect a hunger for more, and a resilience to fatalism within the Cuban community.

“The same way a surgeon, after having opened so many bodies, becomes insensitive to blood, to the smell of blood and organs… It’s the same for a Cuban,” Oraza explains.

“Once he has opened a fan, he is used to seeing everything from the inside… All the symbols that unify an object, that make a unique entity– for a Cuban those don’t exist.”

A Brief History of the “Testocracy,” Standardized Testing and Test-Defying (Truthout)

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Wednesday, 25 March 2015 00:00

By Jesse Hagopian, Haymarket Books | Book Excerpt 

CHICAGO- 24 April, 2013: Demonstrator holds sign at a rally against school closings and over testing. (Photo: Sarah Jane Rhee)

Demonstrators rally against school closings and testing in Chicago, April 24, 2013. (Photo: Sarah Jane Rhee)

“We are experiencing the largest ongoing revolt against high-stakes standardized testing in US history,” according to Jesse Hagopian, high school history teacher, education writer and editor of More Than a Score. This remarkable book introduces the educators, students, parents and others who make up the resistance movement pushing back against the corporate “testocracy.” Click here to order More Than a Score today by making a donation to Truthout!

In this excerpt from More Than a Score, Jesse Hagopian explains who the “testocracy” are, what they want – for everybody else’s children and for their own – and why more people than ever before are resisting tests and working collectively to reclaim public education.

Who are these testocrats who would replace teaching with testing? The testocracy, in my view, does not only refer to the testing conglomerates—most notably the multibillion-dollar Pearson testing and textbook corporation—that directly profit from the sale of standardized exams. The testocracy is also the elite stratum of society that finances and promotes competition and privatization in public education rather than collaboration, critical thinking, and the public good. Not dissimilar to a theocracy, under our current testocracy, a deity—in this case the exalted norm-referenced bubble exam—is officially recognized as the civil ruler of education whose policy is governed by officials that regard test results as divine. The testocratic elite are committed to reducing the intellectual and emotional process of teaching and learning to a single number—a score they subsequently use to sacrifice education on the altar devoted to high-stakes testing by denying students promotion or graduation, firing teachers, converting schools into privatized charters, or closing schools altogether. You’ve heard of this program; the testocracy refers to it as “education reform.”

Among the most prominent members of the testocracy are some of the wealthiest people the world has ever known.

Among the most prominent members of the testocracy are some of the wealthiest people the world has ever known. Its tsars include billionaires Bill Gates, Eli Broad, and members of the Walton family (the owners of Walmart), who have used their wealth to circumvent democratic processes and impose test-and-punish policies in public education. They fund a myriad of organizations—such as Michelle Rhee’s StudentsFirst, Teach for America, and Stand for Children—that serve as shock troops to enforce the implantation of high-stakes testing and corporate education reform in states and cities across the nation. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan serves to help coordinate and funnel government money to the various initiatives of the testocracy. The plan to profit from public schools was expressed by billionaire media executive Rupert Murdoch, when he said in a November 2010 press release: “When it comes to K through 12 education, we see a $500 billion sector in the U.S. alone that is waiting desperately to be transformed by big breakthroughs that extend the reach of great teaching.”

Testing companies got the memo and are working diligently to define great teaching as preparing students for norm-referenced exams—available to districts across the country if the price is right. The textbook and testing industry generates between $20 billion and $30 billion dollars per year. Pearson, a multi-national corporation based in Britain, brings in more than $9 billion annually, and is the world’s largest education company and book publisher. But it’s not the only big testing company poised to profit from the testocracy. Former president George W. Bush’s brother Neil and his parents founded a company called Ignite! Learning to sell test products after the passage of No Child Left Behind.

“An Invalid Measure”: The Fundamental Flaws of Standardized Testing

The swelling number of test-defiers is rooted in the increase of profoundly flawed standardized exams. Often, these tests don’t reflect the concepts emphasized in the students’ classes and, just as often, the results are not available until after the student has already left the teacher’s classroom, rendering the test score useless as a tool for informing instruction. Yet the problem of standardized bubble tests’ usefulness for educators extends well beyond the lag time (which can be addressed by computerized tests that immediately calculate results). A standardized bubble test does not help teachers understand how a student arrived at answer choice “C.” The student may have selected the right answer but not known why it was right, or conversely, may have chosen the wrong answer but had sophisticated reasoning that shows a deeper understanding of the concept than someone else who randomly guessed correctly. Beyond the lack of utility of standardized testing in facilitating learning there is a more fundamental flaw. A norm-referenced, standardized test compares each individual student to everyone else taking the test, and the score is then usually reported as a percentile. Alfie Kohn describes the inherent treachery of the norm-referenced test:

No matter how many students take an NRT [norm-referenced test], no matter how well or poorly they were taught, no matter how difficult the questions are, the pattern of results is guaranteed to be the same: Exactly 10 percent of those who take the test will score in the top 10 percent. And half will always fall below the median. That’s not because our schools are failing; that’s because of what the word median means.

And as professor of education Wayne Au explained in 2011, when he was handed a bullhorn at the Occupy Education protest outside the headquarters of Gates Foundation, “If all the students passed the test you advocate, that test would immediately be judged an invalid metric, and any measure of students which mandates the failure of students is an invalid measure.”

Researchers have long known that what standardized tests measure above all else is a student’s access to resources.

Unsurprisingly, the Gates Foundation was not swayed by the logic of Au’s argument. That is because standardized testing serves to reinforce the mythology of a meritocracy in which those on the top have achieved their position rightfully—because of their hard work, their dedication to hitting the books, and their superior intelligence as proven by their scores. But what researchers have long known is that what standardized tests measure above all else is a student’s access to resources. The most damning truth about standardized tests is that they are a better indicator of a student’s zip code than a student’s aptitude. Wealthier, and predominantly whiter, districts score better on tests. Their scores do not reflect the intelligence of wealthier, mostly white students when compared to those of lower-income students and students of color, but do reflect the advantages that wealthier children have—books in the home, parents with more time to read with them, private tutoring, access to test-prep agencies, high-quality health care, and access to good food, to name a few. This is why attaching high stakes to these exams only serves to exacerbate racial and class inequality. As Boston University economics professors Olesya Baker and Kevin Lang’s 2013 study, “The School to Prison Pipeline Exposed,” reveals, the increases in the use of high-stakes standardized high school exit exams are linked to higher incarceration rates. Arne Duncan’s refusal to address the concerns raised by this study exposes the bankruptcy of testocratic policy.

Hypocrisy of the Testocracy

At first glance it would be easy to conclude that the testocracy’s strategy for public schools is the result of profound ignorance. After all, members of the testocracy have never smelled a free or reduced-price lunch yet throw a tantrum when public school advocates suggest poverty is a substantial factor in educational outcomes. The testocracy has never had to puzzle over the conundrum of having more students than available chairs in the classroom, yet they are the very same people who claim class size doesn’t matter in educational outcomes. The bubble of luxury surrounding the testocracy has convinced many that most testocrats are too far removed from the realities facing the majority of US residents to ever understand the damage caused by the high-stakes bubble tests they peddle. While it is true that the corporate reform moguls are completely out of touch with the vast majority of people, their strategy for remaking our schools on a business model is not the result of ignorance but of arrogance, not of misunderstanding but of the profit motive, not of silliness but rather of a desire for supremacy.

In fact, you could argue that the MAP test boycott did not actually begin at Garfield High School. A keen observer might recognize that the boycott of the MAP test—and so many other standardized tests—began in earnest at schools like Seattle’s elite private Lakeside High School, alma mater of Bill Gates, where he sends his children, because, of course, Lakeside, like one-percenter schools elsewhere, would never inundate its students with standardized tests. These academies, predominantly serving the children of the financially fortunate, shield students from standardized tests because they want their children to be allowed to think outside the bubble test, to develop critical thinking skills and prioritize time to explore art, music, drama, athletics, and debate. Gates values Lakeside because of its lovely campus, where the average class size is sixteen, the library contains some twenty thousand volumes, and the new sports facility offers cryotherapy and hydrotherapy spas. Moreover, while Gates, President Obama, and Secretary of Education Duncan are all parents of school-age children, none of those children attend schools that use the CCSS or take Common Core exams. As Dao X. Tran, then PTA co-chair at Castle Bridge Elementary School, put it (in chapter 20 of More Than a Score): “These officials don’t even send their children to public schools. They are failing our children, yet they push for our children’s teachers to be accountable based on children’s test data. All while they opt for their own children to go to schools that don’t take these tests, that have small class sizes and project-based, hands-on, arts-infused learning—that’s what we want for our children!” The superrich are not failing to understand the basics of how to provide a nurturing education for the whole child. The problem is that they believe this type of education should be reserved only for their own children.

A Brief History of Test-defying

The United States has a long history of using standardized testing for the purposes of ranking and sorting youth into different strata of society. In fact, standardized tests originally entered the public schools with the eugenics movement, a white-supremacist ideology cloaked in the shabby garments of fraudulent science that became fashionable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Rethinking Schools editorialized,

The United States has a long history of using intelligence tests to support white supremacy and class stratification. Standardized tests first entered the public schools in the 1920s, pushed by eugenicists whose pseudoscience promoted the “natural superiority” of wealthy, white, U.S.-born males. High-stakes standardized tests have disguised class and race privilege as merit ever since. The consistent use of test scores to demonstrate first a “mental ability” gap and now an “achievement” gap exposes the intrinsic nature of these tests: They are built to maintain inequality, not to serve as an antidote to educational disparities.

When the first “common schools” began in the late 1800s, industrialists quickly recognized an opportunity to shape the schools in the image of their factories. These early “education reformers” recognized the value of using standardized tests—first developed in the form of IQ tests used to sort military recruits for World War I—to evaluate the efficiency of the teacher workforce in producing the “student-product.” Proud eugenicist and Princeton University professor Carl Brigham left his school during World War I to implement IQ testing as an army psychologist. Upon returning to Princeton, Brigham developed the SAT exam as the admissions gatekeeper to Princeton, and the test confirmed in his mind that whites born in the United States were the most intelligent of all peoples. As Alan Stoskopf wrote, “By the early 1920s, more than 2 million American school children were being tested primarily for academic tracking purposes. At least some of the decisions to allocate resources and select students for academic or vocational courses were influenced by eugenic notions of student worth.”

Some of the most important early voices in opposition to intelligence testing came from leading African American scholars.

Resistance to these exams surely began the first time a student bubbled in every “A” on the page in defiance of the entire testing process. Yet, beyond these individual forms of protest, an active minority of educators, journalists, labor groups, and parents resisted these early notions of using testing to rank intelligence. Some of the most important early voices in opposition to intelligence testing—especially in service of ranking the races—came from leading African American scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Horace Mann Bond, and Howard Long. Du Bois recalled in 1940, “It was not until I was long out of school and indeed after the [First] World War that there came the hurried use of the new technique of psychological tests, which were quickly adjusted so as to put black folk absolutely beyond the possibility of civilization.”

In a statement that is quite apparently lost on today’s testocracy, Horace Mann Bond, in his work “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda,” wrote:

But so long as any group of men attempts to use these tests as funds of information for the approximation of crude and inaccurate generalizations, so long must we continue to cry, “Hold!” To compare the crowded millions of New York’s East Side with the children of Morningside Heights [an upper-class neighborhood at the time] indeed involves a great contradiction; and to claim that the results of the tests given to such diverse groups, drawn from such varying strata of the social complex, are in any wise accurate, is to expose a fatuous sense of unfairness and lack of appreciation of the great environmental factors of modern urban life.

This history of test-defiers was largely buried until the mass uprisings of the civil rights and Black Power movements of the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s transformed public education. In the course of these broad mass movements, parents, students, teachers, and activists fought to integrate the schools, budget for equitable funding, institute ethnic studies programs, and even to redefine the purpose of school.

In the Jim Crow–segregated South, literacy was inherently political and employed as a barrier to prevent African Americans from exercising their right to vote. The great activist and educator Myles Horton was a founder of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee that would go on to help organize the Citizenship Schools of the mid-1950s and 1960s. The Citizenship Schools’ mission was to create literacy programs to help disenfranchised Southern blacks achieve access to the voting booth. Hundreds of thousands of African Americans attended the Citizenship Schools, which launched one of the most important educational programs of the civil rights movement, redefining the purpose of education and the assessment of educational outcomes. Horton described one of the Citizenship Schools he helped to organize, saying, “It was not a literacy class. It was a community organization. . . . They were talking about using their citizenship to do something, and they named it a Citizenship School, not a literacy school. That helped with the motivation.” By the end of the class more than 80 percent of those students passed the final examination, which was to go down to the courthouse and register to vote!

What the Testocracy Wants

The great civil rights movements of the past have reimagined education as a means to creating a more just society. The testocracy, too, has a vision for reimagining the education system and it is flat-out chilling. The testocracy is relentlessly working on new methods to reduce students to data points that can be used to rank, punish, and manipulate. Like something out of a dystopian sci-fi film, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation spent $1.4 million to develop bio-metric bracelets designed to send a small current across the skin to measure changes in electrical charges as the sympathetic nervous system responds to stimuli. These “Q Sensors” would then be used to monitor a student’s “excitement, stress, fear, engagement, boredom and relaxation through the skin.” Presumably, then, VAM assessments could be extended to evaluate teachers based on this biometric data. As Diane Ravitch explained to Reuters when the story broke in the spring of 2012, “They should devote more time to improving the substance of what is being taught . . . and give up all this measurement mania.”

But the testocracy remains relentless in its quest to give up on teaching and devote itself to data collection. In a 2011 TIME magazine feature on the future of education, readers are asked to “imagine walking into a classroom and seeing no one in the front of the classroom. Instead you’re led to a computer terminal at a desk and told this will be your teacher for the course. The only adults around are a facilitator to make sure that you stay on task and to fix any tech problems that may arise.” TIME goes on to point out, “For some Florida students, computer-led instruction is a reality. Within the Miami-Dade County Public School district alone, 7,000 students are receiving this form of education, including six middle and K–8 schools, according to the New York Times.” This approach to schooling is known as “e-learning labs,” and from the perspective of the testocracy, if education is about getting a high score, then one hardly needs nurturing, mentorship, or human contact to succeed. Computers can be used to add value—the value of rote memorization, discipline, and basic literacy skills—to otherwise relatively worthless students. Here, then, is a primary objective of an education system run by the testocracy: replace the compassionate hand of the educator with the cold, invisible, all-thumbs hand of the free market.

Nueva Chicago acusa al Ministerio de Seguridad por discriminación (Clarín)

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Violencia en el fútbol

Los dirigentes no concurrirán a la cancha esta tarde, cuando el equipo de Mataderos se enfrente a Defensores de Villa Ramallo por la Copa Argentina.

La hinchada de Nueva Chicago no podrá estar el jueves en Parque de los Patricios. (Foto: archivo)

La hinchada de Nueva Chicago no podrá estar el jueves en Parque de los Patricios. (Foto: archivo)

La dirigencia de Nueva Chicago denunció al Ministerio de Seguridad por discriminación tras obligarlo a jugar sin motivos a puertas cerradas. Además, y en señal de protesta, los dirigentes y los periodistas partidarios del club de Mataderos no concurrirán esta tarde, a las 17, al duelo ante Defensores de Belgrano de Ramallo en cancha de Huracán por los 32avos de la Copa Argentina.

Ayer, el vicepresidente Daniel Ferreiro manifestó: “No sabemos por qué nuestro público no puede estar. Es simple: nos discriminan”, y en esa sintonía hubo acuerdo para no ir al estadio. “Vamos todos o ninguno”, fue el comunicado que enviaron los medios partidarios. “Los dirigentes nos solidarizamos con nuestra gente”, aseguró Ferreiro.

Por tal razón, el club emitió un comunicado en el que sostiene que “ser hincha de Nueva Chicago no es delito”. “Nuestra institución se ajusta a lo solicitado por cuanto organismo de seguridad nos pide, nunca nos tembló el pulso para firmar derechos de admisión a quienes tuvieran comportamientos violentos”, señala en parte el documento firmado por el presidente, Sergio Ramos, y Martin Lamarca, Secretario General del club.

“La Comisión Directiva de Nueva Chicago lamenta profundamente que se le niegue la posibilidad de asistir a nuestra gente al estadio. Consideramos injusta esta medida que nos enteramos por los medios de comunicación y por la empresa Ticketek, dado que nunca nos llegó la notificación oficial”, comienza el comunicado. “A partir de este momento o vamos todos o no va ninguno”, concluye.

*   *   *

25/03/2015 18:57

La violencia gana: seis partidos a puertas cerradas (Mundo D)

Habrá sanciones para varios clubes de Primera, y uno en la Copa Argentina, y por eso se disputarán sin hinchadas. Un repaso del sinsentido.

El Nuevo Gasómetro estará vacío para el partido ante Lanús.

El Nuevo Gasómetro estará vacío para el partido ante Lanús.

Por Mundo D

Cada vez es más complicado vivir el fútbol argentino en paz. La violencia está acorralando al espectáculo y ya no sirve siquiera jugar sólo con público local. En la próxima fecha, por diferentes razones, habrá cinco encuentros de la Primera División a puertas cerradas. Sí, sin nadie en las gradas. Y además, habrá uno de la Copa Argentina. Insólito.

¿Qué partidos serán?

  • San Lorenzo-Lanus
  • Godoy Cruz-Independiente
  • Tigre-Defensa y Justicia
  • Quilmes-Sarmiento
  • Gimnasia de La Plata-River
  • Chicago-Defensores de Villa Ramallo

En el caso de San Lorenzo ante Lanús, no habrá gente en las tribunas por la sanción que el Comité de Seguridad le aplicó al “Cuervo” por los incidentes contra el juez de línea Juan Pablo Belatti en la vuelta de la Recopa ante River.

Sí, San Lorenzo ya jugó ante Colón, San Martín de San Juan y Huracán con público. Recién ahora, llega la suspensión. Cosas de Argentina.

Por su parte, Godoy Cruz recibirá a Independiente a puertas cerradas por la agresión que sufrió el masajista de Lanús en la cuarta fecha, la última vez que “el Tomba” se presentó en el Malvinas Argentinas.

Tanto en Tigre como en Quilmes, habrá situaciones similares. Los dos estadios fueron suspendidos por los incidentes en sus propias tribunas, con distintas porciones de sus propias hinchadas.

La lista sigue con Nueva Chicago, que también pagará una sanción. En el caso del “Torito” no tendrá público en el choque del jueves por Copa Argentina (ante Defensores de Villa Ramallo). Este partido se disputará en la cancha de Huracán y la policía no prestará servicio para trasladar a los hinchas del “Torito”.

River, también
Por último, Gimnasia recibirá el próximo domingo a River en El Bosque pero a puertas cerradas. Es que la Justicia falló a favor de la Aprevide (Agencia de Prevención en el Deporte).

¿Qué había pasado? “El Lobo” había recibido la sanción de la Aprevide (por los incidentes que protagonizaron sus hinchas en el clásico platense) y debía jugar ante Nueva Chicago a puertas cerradas. Pero el club fue a la justicia, que le dio curso a un recurso de amparo y pudo recibir al “Torito” (por la quinta fecha) con hinchas.

Ahora, Aprevide apeló y la justicia le dio la razón.

Multi species Epistemes (Knowledge Ecology)

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March 23, 2015

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The epistemic import of camouflage vis-a-vis notions of realism is an under researched area of inquiry.

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Camouflaged critters bring to mind not just the intersubjective character of perception but also its interspecies reality.

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Different organisms hide not just from us humans but also from a wide variety of other species, playing on appearances.

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This means that we humans encounter phenomena in terms of specific perceptual capacities, but not in a way entirely alien to other species.

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The point is not to efface differences across species but to explore multispecies entanglements in perception.

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Because the aesthetic play of appearances can be life or death in multispecies epistemes.

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Earth is halfway to being inhospitable to life, scientist says (RT)

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Published time: March 20, 2015 04:02

Edited time: March 21, 2015 10:25 

Reuters / NASA

Reuters / NASA

A Swedish scientist claims in a new theory that humanity has exceeded four of the nine limits for keeping the planet hospitable to modern life, while another professor told RT Earth may be seeing an impending human-made extinction of various species.

Environmental science professor Johan Rockstrom, the executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, argues that there are nine “planetary boundaries” in a new paper published in Science – and human beings have already crossed four of them.

Those nine include carbon dioxide concentrations, maintaining biodiversity at 90 percent, the use of nitrogen and phosphorous, maintaining 75 percent of original forests, aerosol emissions, stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification, fresh water use and the dumping of pollutants.

“The planet has been our best friend by buffering our actions and showing its resilience,” said Rockstrom. “But for the first time ever, we might shift the planet from friend to foe.”

Image from ideas.ted.com

Image from ideas.ted.com

Rockstrom’s planetary boundary theory was first conceived in 2007. His new paper reveals that because of climate stability, which began when the Ice Age ended 11,000 years ago, a planetary calm helped our ancestors to cultivate wheat, domesticate animals, and launch industrial and communications revolutions. But those advances have strained the stability of the planet, and Rockstrom says we have broken four boundaries: too much nitrogen has been added to ecosystems, too many forests have been cut down, the climate is changing too quickly and species are going extinct at too great a rate.

Speaking to RT’s Ben Swann, Professor of Ethics Bron Taylor from the University of Florida said that we have accelerated the extinction crisis through deforestation and ocean acidification, a development which is driving species to extinction.

“[Human] beings have increased, even from 1925, from 2 billion – which is considered to be a sustainable population for human beings, according to northern European consumption standards – to 7.2 billion at this point,” he said.

“What we have also done is increased the number of domestic animals, the ones we eat and the ones that are companion animals. We have 4.3 domestic animals one for every two human beings on the planet. Cultivating the land they need creates species extinction because where they are, other organism are not. Where we cut down forests for cattle, other species are not there.”

“We are losing literally tens of thousands of endemic or native species to these trends.”

Professor Taylor told RT that scientists say we entering the Sixth extinction, but that this an anthropogenic extinction caused by human beings.

“If you don’t have control over something, there is no moral obligation,” said Taylor. “In this case, we are doing it. So we have to ask the question: If we are doing something that is driving species off the planet, are we in some sense morally culpable?”

“What right do we have to drive [out] other species, who got here in precisely in the same way that we have, who have participated in the long struggle for existence just as we have?”

Meanwhile, Professor Rockstrom is using his planetary boundary theory not as a doomsday message but as analysis to keep the planet “safe” for humanity. He said nations can cut their carbon emissions to almost nothing and pull the Earth back across the climate boundary.

“For the first time,” he said, “we have a framework for growth, for eradicating poverty and hunger, and for improving health.”

Los rayos cósmicos confirman que se fundió el corazón de Fukushima (El País)

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Un detector de muones muestra el interior de dos reactores accidentados en Japón

, 23 MAR 2015 – 17:04 CET

Imagen proporcionada por Tepco sobre estos trabajos de detección.

Mientras Chernóbil todavía lucha para cubrir los restos de la tragediacon un segundo sarcófago, en Fukushima aún dan los primeros pasos para controlar por completo y desmantelar los reactores accidentados en 2011, una tarea que durará unas cuatro décadas. Al margen de las interminables fugas de agua que traen de cabeza a los responsables de la central, el principal objetivo es determinar la situación exacta del combustible radiactivo que quedó fuera de control durante varios días, provocando la mayor catástrofe atómica en lustros. Ahora, gracias a los rayos cósmicos, tenemos la confirmación de que el núcleo del reactor 1 de Fukushima se fundió por completo y que también se derritió, parcialmente, el combustible del reactor 2.

Los trabajos de desmantelamiento de la central ya han costado 1.450 millones a Japón

Esas barras de uranio derretidas generan tanto peligro que no ha sido posible entrar hasta el corazón de los reactores accidentados para determinar exactamente su estado. Las mediciones indirectas indicaban que estábamos en un escenario de fusión de los núcleos pero una nueva técnica que se sirve de la física de partículas ha ayudado a radiografiar, por el momento, dos de los reactores accidentados. Se trata de un detector de muones, unas partículas elementales que surgen cuando penetran en la atmósfera los rayos cósmicos, y que llegan por miles hasta la superficie de la Tierra. Estas partículas que frenan al chocar con objetos muy densos, como el combustible nuclear, y se pueden detectar con una suerte de placas de radiografía colocadas a los lados del reactor.

Al atravesar todo el invento, los muones han mostrado que no queda nada de combustible en el corazón del reactor número 1. Es decir, mientras el núcleo estuvo sin refrigerar con agua durante el accidente, las barras de uranio se derritieron por completo, cayendo por el fondo de la vasija que las contenía. Por eso no salen en la fotografía que han conseguido los físicos de varias universidades japonesas, que han desarrollado esta técnica junto a científicos del Laboratorio de Los Álamos y la empresa Toshiba, responsable de los trabajos de desmantelamiento de Fukushima.

Como la plancha detectora de los muones se coloca a ras de suelo, la imagen que ha devuelto de este reactor solo permite saber que el combustible se fundió y ya no está en su sitio, pero no ayuda a saber cuál es su situación en el sótano del reactor o si ha comprometido por el suelo la robusta contención que separa el núcleo del exterior. Posteriormente, Tepco ha dado a conocer el resultado de este examen en el reactor 2, que ha mostrado una descomposición parcial del núcleo al comparar la imagen con la de un reactor en condiciones normales.

Los científicos no pueden saber hasta dónde ha caído el núcleo fundido del reactor

“Los resultados reafirman nuestra idea previa de que una cantidad considerable de combustible se había fundido en el interior”, explicó Hiroshi Miyano, uno de los científicos, a AFP.  “Pero no hay evidencia de que el combustible se haya derretido a través de los edificios de contención y alcanzado el exterior”. Para asegurarse, el siguiente paso será el uso de robots que se cuelen por todos los rincones de los edificios.

Hoy se ha conocido el gasto que ha supuesto hasta el momento el desmantelamiento de Fukushima para los japoneses: 1.450 millones de euros de las arcas públicas, según un informe gubernamental que recoge la agencia Kyodo. Poco más de un tercio de ese dinero se ha gastado en los esfuerzos por controlar las continuas filtraciones y fugas de agua que inundan todo el entorno de la central.

Coping with the anthropocene: How we became nature (Science Daily)

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Date: March 17, 2015

Source: De Gruyter

Summary: Overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, warming temperatures and overall climate disruption are all well recognized as a major threat to the ecology and biodiversity of the Earth.  The issue of humankind’s negative impact on the environment, albeit hotly debated and continuously present in the public eye, still only leads to limited policy action.

Overpopulation, the greenhouse effect, warming temperatures and overall climate disruption are all well recognized as a major threat to the ecology and biodiversity of the Earth. The issue of mankind’s negative impact on the environment, albeit hotly debated and continuously present in the public eye, still only leads to limited policy action. Urgent action is required, insist Paul Cruzten and Stanislaw Waclawek, the authors of “Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate in the Anthropocene,” published in open access in the new Chemistry-Didactics-Ecology-Metrology.

In their sobering review, Crutzen, the 1995 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, and Waclawek, outline the development of a new geological epoch — the Anthropocene, where human actions become a global geophysical force, surpassing that of nature itself.

Anthropocene, which relates to the present geological epoch, in which human actions determine the behavior of the planet Earth to a greater degree than other natural processes. The term, coined by American ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer and popularized by Crutzen, introduced the epoch succeeding the Holocene, which is the official term for the present epoch on Geological Time Scale, covering the last 11, 500 years.

Although Anthropocene is not a new concept, it is only now that the authors present stunning evidence in support of their claim. The article describes the negative impact of the human footprint, which ensues a gradual destruction of the Earth. Highlighting different data elements — it yields overwhelming evidence that “man, the eroder” now transforms the atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric, and other earth system processes.

The list is long and unforgiving:

· Excessively rapid climate change, so that ecosystems cannot adapt

· The Arctic ocean ice cover is thinner by approximately 40% compared to 20-40 years ago

· Ice loss and the growing sea levels

· Overpopulation (fourfold increase in the 20th century alone)

· Increasing demand for freshwater

· Releases of NO into the atmosphere, resulting in high surface ozone layers

· Loss of agricultural soil through erosion

· Loss of phosphorus. Dangerous depletion in agricultural regions

· Melting supplies of phosphate reserves (leading to serious reduction in crop yield)

Describing the negative impact of human activities on the environment, the authors identify planetary boundaries, as means to attaining global sustainability. It is “a well-documented summary of all humankind actions affecting the environment on all scales. According to Crutzen, we live in a new era, Anthropocene, and our survival fully depends on us. I strongly recommend this unusual publication in the form of highly informative compressed slides and graphs.” says Marina Frontasyeva from the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia. Nature is us, and responding to the Anthropocene means building a culture that grows with the Earth’s biological wealth instead of depleting it.

Journal Reference:

  1. Paul J. Crutzen, Stanisław Wacławek. Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate in the Anthropocene. Chemistry-Didactics-Ecology-Metrology, 2015 DOI: 10.1515/cdem-2014-0001

Geoengineering proposal may backfire: Ocean pipes ‘not cool,’ would end up warming climate (Science Daily)

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Date: March 19, 2015

Source: Carnegie Institution

Summary: There are a variety of proposals that involve using vertical ocean pipes to move seawater to the surface from the depths in order to reap different potential climate benefits. One idea involves using ocean pipes to facilitate direct physical cooling of the surface ocean by replacing warm surface ocean waters with colder, deeper waters. New research shows that these pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically.

To combat global climate change caused by greenhouse gases, alternative energy sources and other types of environmental recourse actions are needed. There are a variety of proposals that involve using vertical ocean pipes to move seawater to the surface from the depths in order to reap different potential climate benefits.A new study from a group of Carnegie scientists determines that these types of pipes could actually increase global warming quite drastically. It is published in Environmental Research Letters.

One proposed strategy–called Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion, or OTEC–involves using the temperature difference between deeper and shallower water to power a heat engine and produce clean electricity. A second proposal is to move carbon from the upper ocean down into the deep, where it wouldn’t interact with the atmosphere. Another idea, and the focus of this particular study, proposes that ocean pipes could facilitate direct physical cooling of the surface ocean by replacing warm surface ocean waters with colder, deeper waters.

“Our prediction going into the study was that vertical ocean pipes would effectively cool the Earth and remain effective for many centuries,” said Ken Caldeira, one of the three co-authors.

The team, which also included lead author Lester Kwiatkowski as well as Katharine Ricke, configured a model to test this idea and what they found surprised them. The model mimicked the ocean-water movement of ocean pipes if they were applied globally reaching to a depth of about a kilometer (just over half a mile). The model simulated the motion created by an idealized version of ocean pipes, not specific pipes. As such the model does not include real spacing of pipes, nor does it calculate how much energy they would require.

Their simulations showed that while global temperatures could be cooled by ocean pipe systems in the short term, warming would actually start to increase just 50 years after the pipes go into use. Their model showed that vertical movement of ocean water resulted in a decrease of clouds over the ocean and a loss of sea-ice.

Colder air is denser than warm air. Because of this, the air over the ocean surface that has been cooled by water from the depths has a higher atmospheric pressure than the air over land. The cool air over the ocean sinks downward reducing cloud formation over the ocean. Since more of the planet is covered with water than land, this would result in less cloud cover overall, which means that more of the Sun’s rays are absorbed by Earth, rather than being reflected back into space by clouds.

Water mixing caused by ocean pipes would also bring sea ice into contact with warmer waters, resulting in melting. What’s more, this would further decrease the reflection of the Sun’s radiation, which bounces off ice as well as clouds.

After 60 years, the pipes would cause an increase in global temperature of up to 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2degrees Fahrenheit). Over several centuries, the pipes put the Earth on a warming trend towards a temperature increase of 8.5 degrees Celsius (15.3 degrees Fahrenheit).

“I cannot envisage any scenario in which a large scale global implementation of ocean pipes would be advisable,” Kwiatkowski said. “In fact, our study shows it could exacerbate long-term warming and is therefore highly inadvisable at global scales.”

The authors do say, however, that ocean pipes might be useful on a small scale to help aerate ocean dead zones.

Journal Reference:

  1. Lester Kwiatkowski, Katharine L Ricke and Ken Caldeira. Atmospheric consequences of disruption of the ocean thermocline. Environmental Research Letters, 2015 DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/10/3/034016

Welcome to Global Warming’s Terrifying New Era (Slate)

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By Eric Holthaus

19 March 2015

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Storm damage in Port Vila, Vanuatu. Photo by UNICEF via Getty Images

On Wednesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announcedthat Earth’s global temperature for February was among the hottest ever measured. So far, 2015 is tracking above record-warm 2014—which, when combined with the newly resurgent El Niño, means we’re on pace for another hottest year in history.

In addition to the just-completed warmest winter on record globally (despite the brutal cold and record snow in the eastern U.S.), new data on Thursday from the National Snow and Ice Data Center show that this year’s peak Arctic sea ice reached its lowest ever maximum extent, thanks to “an unusual configuration of the jet stream” that greatly warmed the Pacific Ocean near Alaska.

But here’s the most upsetting news. It’s been exactly 30 years since the last time the world was briefly cooler than its 20th-century average. Every single month since February 1985 has been hotter than the long-term average—that’s 360 consecutive months.

More than just being a round number, the 30-year streak has deeper significance. In climatology, a continuous 30-year stretch of data is traditionally what’s used to define what’s “normal” for a given location. In a very real way, we can now say that for our given location—the planet Earth—global warming is now “normal.” Forget debating—our climate has officially changed.

This 30-year streak should change the way we think and talk about this issue. We’ve entered a new era in which global warming is a defining characteristic and a fundamental driver of what it means to be an inhabitant of planet Earth. We should treat it that way. For those who care about the climate, that may mean de-emphasizing statistics and science and beginning to talk more confidently about the moral implications of continuing on our current path.

Since disasters disproportionately impact the poor, climate change is increasingly an important economic and social justice issue. The pope will visit the United States later this year as part of a broader campaign by the Vatican to directly influence the outcome of this year’s global climate negotiations in Paris—recent polling data show his message may be resonating, especially with political conservatives and nonscience types. Two-thirds of Americans now believe that world leaders are morally obligated to take steps to reduce carbon.

Scientists and journalists have debated the connection between extreme weather and global warming for years, but what’s happening now is different. Since weather impacts virtually every facet of our lives (at least in a small way), and since climate change is affecting weather at every point in the globe every day (at least in a small way), that makes it at the same time incredibly difficult to study and incredibly important. Formal attribution studies that attempt to scientifically tease out whether global warming “caused” individual events are shortsighted and miss the point. It’s time for a change in tack. The better question to ask is: How do we as a civilization collectively tackle the weather extremes we already face?

In the aftermath of the nearly unprecedented power and destructive force of Cyclone Pam’s landfall in the remote Pacific island nation of Vanuatu—where survivors were forced to drink saltwater—emerges perhaps the best recent example I’ve seen of a government acknowledging this changed climate in a scientifically sound way:

Cyclone Pam is a consequence of climate change since all weather is affected by the planet’s now considerably warmer climate. The spate of extreme storms over the past decade—of which Pam is the latest—is entirely consistent in science with the hottest ever decade on record.

The statement was from the government of the Philippines, the previous country to suffer a direct strike by a Category 5 cyclone—Haiyan in 2013. As chair of the Climate Vulnerable Forum negotiating bloc, the Philippines also called for a strengthening of ambition in the run-up to this year’s global climate agreement in Paris.

The cost of disasters of all types is rising around the globe as population and wealth increase and storms become more fierce. This week in Japan, 187 countries agreed on a comprehensive plan to reduce loss of life from disasters as well as their financial impact. However, the disaster deal is nonbinding and won’t provide support to the most vulnerable countries.

Combining weather statistics and photos of devastated tropical islands with discussions of political and economic winners and losers is increasingly necessary as climate change enters a new era. We’re no longer describing the problem. We’re telling the story of how humanity reacts to this new normal.

As the Guardian’s Alan Rusbridger, in an editorial kickoff of his newspaper’s newly heightened focus on climate, said, “the mainstream argument has moved on.” What’s coming next isn’t certain, but it’s likely to be much more visceral and real than steadily upward sloping lines on a graph.

Here’s Why Companies Are Desperate To Hire Anthropologists (Business Insider)

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MAR. 27, 2014, 4:22 PM

red associates talking

ReD Associates. A Red Associates staffer consults with a client

At a time when we’re debating the value of majoring in the humanities, major companies are increasingly hiring anthropologists.

Google, for example, hired an ethnographer to ferret out the meaning of mobile. Intel has an in-house cultural anthropologist, and Microsoft is reportedly the second-largest employer of anthropologists in the world.

So the question becomes: Why are giant corporations now seeking cultural expertise?

While most execs are masters of analyzing spreadsheets, creating processes, and pitching products, anthropologists — and other practitioners of applied social science — can arrive at customer insights that big data tends to gloss over, especially around the role that products play in people’s lives.

That information is more valuable than you might think. What customers want from a product and what companies think they want can be totally different, but it can take an anthropological lens to learn why.

Take Adidas, for example. The brand has always been associated with elite performance: Jesse Owens, Muhammad Ali, and Zinedine Zidane all wore the brand. Founded by cobbler and athlete Adi Dassler in 1948, the assumption within the company had been that people bought athletic gear to gain a competitive edge. But in the early 2000s VP James Carnes noticed something strange: He kept running into people who were jogging around the city, headed to the gym, or on their way to yoga.

While they led the active lives of potential customers, these people weren’t training for a competition. “Is yoga a sport?” Carnes asked in an offsite meeting in 2003.

Trying to figure out the disconnect, he brought in a consultancy called Red Associates, which has a client list that includes Intel, Samsung, and Carlsberg, the European beer giant. Unlike elite consulting firms such as McKinsey, Red isn’t in the business of big data and management science. Instead, it focuses on arriving at insights that can only be found through the applied liberal arts, or what it calls “the human sciences,” a strategy that is detailed in its new book “Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences To Solve Your Toughest Business Problems.” That’s why most of the Red’s 70-some employees aren’t MBAs; they come from disciplines like philosophy, sociology, and anthropology.

When Red collaborated with Adidas, it trained members of Adidas’s design team in conducting anthropological research. Design staffers spent 24 hours straight with customers, eating breakfast with them, joining them on runs, and asking them why they worked out. As detailed in the Economist, a Red staffer sent disposable cameras to customers, asking them to take a picture of the reason they exercised. Thirty women responded, and 25 of them sent a picture of a little black dress.

A little black dress is quite different than a marathon finish line or gold trophy.

To use a favorite word of Red partner Christian Madsbjerg, the little black dress shows an “asymmetry.” The traditional thinking at Adidas was that people bought their gear to help them win. But after observing their behavior through the lens of anthropology, it became clear that customers wanted products to help them lead healthy lifestyles, not win competitions.

Christian Madsbjerg red associates

Christian Madsbjerg, a Red Associates partner 

How had Adidas misunderstood its customers for so long? Because Adidas executives thought they understood their customers’ motivations and lives, but they had never observed them closely enough.

Running, mountain biking, hitting the gym, going to yoga — people did these things to live healthier lives. But these “urban sports” weren’t like the traditional competitions that the company was originally organized around.

That was Carnes’s realization: His consumer’s definition of “sport” had changed, and his company had to change along with it. As described in “Moment of Clarity”:

If urban sports are on par with basketball or soccer, Adidas must then deliver on products with functionality, aesthetics, and quality. Adidas must lead, not copy in this whole new category of lifestyle sport …

The company went from being a sports brand exclusively for athletes … to becoming an inclusive brand inviting all of us to join a movement of living a healthier and better life. It went from creating corporate credos aimed at high-performance sports aficionados, such as “Impossible is nothing,” to sending democratic, yet aspirational message like “All In.”

With the help of Red, Adidas was able to understand the world of its customers. Interestingly, it’s the human sciences — literature, arts, anthropology — that allow for understanding the unique worlds that people live in. By observing people’s daily lives and the ways in which they interact with products, consultancies like Red are able to discern what products mean to customers in a way that big data can’t determine.

Why literature helps you understand customers

“If you look at launches of a new product, most of them fail,” Madsbjerg says. “That’s because people don’t understand the worlds in which we operate.”

The problem with standard corporate research, Madsbjerg says, is that it’s incredibly difficult to get around your own preconceptions. Even if your analytics are fresh, you’ll read old assumptions into them. By applying the humanities, however, you can get around them.

Say, for instance, you read an epic novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In doing so, you’re not just processing words on a page, you’re beginning to understand a character’s world in Russia in a specific place, specific time, and from a specific perspective. To hear Red tell it, making an empathetic understanding of a character in a novel is very much like trying to understand a customer — Ford, after all, would be immensely interested in the world of someone buying a car.

It’s anthropological research, like Red helped the Adidas design team with, that allows for understanding the customer’s world.

This is different from the approach of most corporations, which rely on measures like surveys and focus groups. The problem with those is that people have a terrible time reporting their own preferences, Madsbjerg says. In one Swedish study, for instance, everyone reported that they were an exceptional driver, which is obviously impossible. By the same token, asking customers to tell you why they like a particular vodka doesn’t necessarily reveal their motivations.

That’s why Red emphasizes ethnographic interviewing, where you interview a subject again and again and observe them in a range of environments, looking for patterns of behavior. The long-form, in-depth research helps to reveal the worlds that people live in and their real motivations. Major insights follow — that little black dress told Adidas way more about their customers’ world than a survey ever could.

Finding an industry’s need

In another case, Red consulted for a leading pharmaceutical company specializing in diabetes. Back in the day, it was common practice for sales reps to use a “frequency and reach” strategy, talking to as many doctors as possible and pushing a brand message. The sales reps would get the time with doctors by giving them free flights and concert tickets. But then the law changed, and giving swag to doctors was made illegal. All of a sudden what was once a long courtship turned into a 90-second phone call.

In order to sell drugs in this new situation, they needed to recalibrate the conversation.

During the course of interviewing physicians, Red discovered a major concern that most doctors shared: “How do I get my patients to understand their conditions? How do I change their lifestyles?” Medication, it turned out, was the third most important aspect of treating diabetes — diet and exercise were much more vital.

As a result, Red’s associates worked with doctors to find different ways to help people change their diets, and they worked with sales reps to present that info to doctors. Since so many of the diabetes patients didn’t know how to cook, basic meal preparation became part of the sales material. Correspondingly, the pharmaceutical company became way more resonant: By understanding the world of the doctor, the brand saw a 15% increase in key indicators, like doctors’ trust.

The secret was to understand the world of the physicians and to give them what they needed, even if they didn’t consciously realize it yet.

Read more:  http://www.businessinsider.com/heres-why-companies-aredesperateto-hireanthropologists-2014-3#ixzz3Ux42Y7ks

Did a Volcanic Cataclysm 40,000 Years Ago Trigger the Final Demise of the Neanderthals? (Geological Society of America)

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19 March 2015

Boulder, Colo., USA – The Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption in Italy 40,000 years ago was one of the largest volcanic cataclysms in Europe and injected a significant amount of sulfur-dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere. Scientists have long debated whether this eruption contributed to the final extinction of the Neanderthals. This new study by Benjamin A. Black and colleagues tests this hypothesis with a sophisticated climate model.

Black and colleagues write that the CI eruption approximately coincided with the final decline of Neanderthals as well as with dramatic territorial and cultural advances among anatomically modern humans. Because of this, the roles of climate, hominin competition, and volcanic sulfur cooling and acid deposition have been vigorously debated as causes of Neanderthal extinction.

They point out, however, that the decline of Neanderthals in Europe began well before the CI eruption: “Radiocarbon dating has shown that at the time of the CI eruption, anatomically modern humans had already arrived in Europe, and the range of Neanderthals had steadily diminished. Work at five sites in the Mediterranean indicates that anatomically modern humans were established in these locations by then as well.”

“While the precise implications of the CI eruption for cultures and livelihoods are best understood in the context of archaeological data sets,” write Black and colleagues, the results of their study quantitatively describe the magnitude and distribution of the volcanic cooling and acid deposition that ancient hominin communities experienced coincident with the final decline of the Neanderthals.

In their climate simulations, Black and colleagues found that the largest temperature decreases after the eruption occurred in Eastern Europe and Asia and sidestepped the areas where the final Neanderthal populations were living (Western Europe). Therefore, the authors conclude that the eruption was probably insufficient to trigger Neanderthal extinction.

However, the abrupt cold spell that followed the eruption would still have significantly impacted day-to-day life for Neanderthals and early humans in Europe. Black and colleagues point out that temperatures in Western Europe would have decreased by an average of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius during the year following the eruption. These unusual conditions, they write, may have directly influenced survival and day-to-day life for Neanderthals and anatomically modern humans alike, and emphasize the resilience of anatomically modern humans in the face of abrupt and adverse changes in the environment.

FEATURED ARTICLE
Campanian Ignimbrite volcanism, climate, and the final decline of the Neanderthals
Benjamin A. Black et al., University of California, Berkeley, California, USA. Published online ahead of print on 19 March 2015; http://dx.doi.org/10.1130/G36514.1.

Exclusive: Lost City Discovered in the Honduran Rain Forest (NatGeo)

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In search for legendary “City of the Monkey God,” explorers find the untouched ruins of a vanished culture.

A “were-jaguar” effigy, likely representing a combination of a human and spirit animal, is part of a still-buried ceremonial seat, or metate, one of many artifacts discovered in a cache in ruins deep in the Honduran jungle.

By Douglas Preston

Photographs by Dave Yoder

PUBLISHED MARCH 02, 2015

An expedition to Honduras has emerged from the jungle with dramatic news of the discovery of a mysterious culture’s lost city, never before explored. The team was led to the remote, uninhabited region by long-standing rumors that it was the site of a storied “White City,” also referred to in legend as the “City of the Monkey God.”

Archaeologists surveyed and mapped extensive plazas, earthworks, mounds, and an earthen pyramid belonging to a culture that thrived a thousand years ago, and then vanished. The team, which returned from the site last Wednesday, also discovered a remarkable cache of stone sculptures that had lain untouched since the city was abandoned.

Picture of Honduran troops leading a fuel truck and convoy

Honduran troops lead a convoy through a town that served as the base for helicopters ferrying members of the expedition to a location in the Mosquitia rain forest where they examined ruins of an ancient city. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

In contrast to the nearby Maya, this vanished culture has been scarcely studied and it remains virtually unknown. Archaeologists don’t even have a name for it.

Christopher Fisher, a Mesoamerican archaeologist on the team from Colorado State University, said the pristine, unlooted condition of the site was “incredibly rare.” He speculated that the cache, found at the base of the pyramid, may have been an offering.

“The undisturbed context is unique,” Fisher said. “This is a powerful ritual display, to take wealth objects like this out of circulation.”

The tops of 52 artifacts were peeking from the earth. Many more evidently lie below ground, with possible burials. They include stone ceremonial seats (called metates) and finely carved vessels decorated with snakes, zoomorphic figures, and vultures.

The most striking object emerging from the ground is the head of what Fisher speculated might be “a were-jaguar,” possibly depicting a shaman in a transformed, spirit state. Alternatively, the artifact might be related to ritualized ball games that were a feature of pre-Columbian life in Mesoamerica.

“The figure seems to be wearing a helmet,” said Fisher. Team member Oscar Neil Cruz, head archaeologist at the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History (IHAH), believes the artifacts date to A.D. 1000 to 1400.

The objects were documented but left unexcavated. To protect the site from looters, its location is not being revealed.

Picture of a stream winds through part of an unexplored valley in Mosquitia in eastern Honduras

A stream winds through part of an unexplored valley in Mosquitia in eastern Honduras, a region long rumored to contain a legendary “White City,” also called the City of the Monkey God. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Stories of “Casa Blanca” and a Monkey God

The ruins were first identified in May 2012, during an aerial survey of a remote valley in La Mosquitia, a vast region of swamps, rivers, and mountains containing some of the last scientifically unexplored places on earth.

For a hundred years, explorers and prospectors told tales of the white ramparts of a lost city glimpsed above the jungle foliage. Indigenous stories speak of a “white house” or a “place of cacao” where Indians took refuge from Spanish conquistadores—a mystical, Eden-like paradise from which no one ever returned.

Since the 1920s, several expeditions had searched for the White City, orCiudad Blanca. The eccentric explorer Theodore Morde mounted the most famous of these in 1940, under the aegis of the Museum of the American Indian (now part of the Smithsonian Institution).

Picture of former British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers prepare a helicopter pilot for liftoff

Former British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers prepare a helicopter pilot for liftoff from a landing zone cleared for a team of scientists surveying a secret location in the Mosquitia jungle. The helicopter ferried people and supplies from its base. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Morde returned from Mosquitia with thousands of artifacts, claiming to have entered the City. According to Morde, the indigenous people there said it contained a giant, buried statue of a monkey god. He refused to divulge the location out of fear, he said, that the site would be looted. He later committed suicide and his site—if it existed at all—was never identified.

More recently, documentary filmmakers Steve Elkins and Bill Benenson launched a search for the lost city.

They identified a crater-shaped valley, encircled by steep mountains, as a possible location.

To survey it, in 2012 they enlisted the help of the Center for Airborne Laser Mapping at the University of Houston. A Cessna Skymaster, carrying a million-dollar lidar scanner, flew over the valley, probing the jungle canopy with laser light. lidar—“Light Detection and Ranging”—is able to map the ground even through dense rain forest, delineating any archaeological features that might be present.

When the images were processed, they revealed unnatural features stretching for more than a mile through the valley. When Fisher analyzed the images, he found that the terrain along the river had been almost entirely reshaped by human hands.

Former British SAS soldier Andrew Wood hacks through thick foliage to clear a way for scientists to investigate an archaeological site first identified using an aerial imaging technology called lidar. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Archaeologist Oscar Neil Cruz of the Honduran Institute of Anthropology and History examines a building stone discovered during a foray to a location identified by lidar as a place of interest. Several such construction stones, apparently shaped by hand, were found in a row at the top of what appears to be an ancient plaza. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Former British SAS commando Steve “Sully” Sullivan (right) waits while the scientific team puzzles over a construction stone that they believe was carved by members of a vanished civilization yet to be identified. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Frequent rains turned the expedition camp into a sea of mud. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

The evidence of public and ceremonial architecture, giant earthworks and house mounds, possible irrigation canals and reservoirs, all led Fisher to conclude that the settlement was, indeed, a pre-Columbian city.

Threatened by Deforestation

An archaeological discovery isn’t confirmed until it has been “ground-truthed.” The ground exploration team consisted of American and Honduran archaeologists, a lidar engineer, an anthropologist, an ethnobotanist, documentary filmmakers, and support personnel. Sixteen Honduran Special Forces soldiers provided security. The National Geographic Society sent a photographer and a writer.

The expedition confirmed on the ground all the features seen in the lidar images, along with much more. It was indeed an ancient city. Archaeologists, however, no longer believe in the existence of a single “lost city,” or Ciudad Blanca, as described in the legends. They believe Mosquitia harbors many such “lost cities,” which taken together represent something far more important—a lost civilization.

Picture of Anna Cohen, a University of Washington anthropology grad student, documents artifacts

Anna Cohen, a University of Washington anthropology grad student, documents a cache of more than 50 artifacts discovered in the jungle. Following scientific protocol, no objects were removed from the site. The scientists hope to mount an expedition soon to further document and excavate the site before it can be found by looters. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

The valley is densely carpeted in a rain forest so primeval that the animals appear never to have seen humans before. An advance team clearing a landing zone for helicopters supplying the expedition noted spider monkeys peering down curiously from the trees above, and guinea hen and a tapir wandering into camp, unafraid of the human visitors.

This is clearly the most undisturbed rain forest in Central America. The importance of this place can’t be overestimated. – Mark Plotkin, ethnobotanist

“This is clearly the most undisturbed rain forest in Central America,” said the expedition’s ethnobotanist, Mark Plotkin, who spent 30 years in Amazonia. “The importance of this place can’t be overestimated.”

The region also is gravely threatened. Deforestation for ranching has checkerboarded the jungle to within a dozen miles of the valley. Huge swaths of virgin rain forest are being cut illegally and burned to make way for cattle. The region has become one of the biggest beef-producing areas in Central America, supplying meat to fast-food franchises in the United States.

Picture of in addition to looting, another threat to the newly discovered ruins is deforestation

In addition to looting, another threat to the newly discovered ruins is deforestation for cattle ranching, seen here on a hillside on the way to the site. At its present pace, deforestation could reach the valley within a few years. PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVE YODER, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Virgilio Paredes Trapero, the director of the IHAH, under whose auspices the expedition operated, spent several days at the site. He concluded: “If we don’t do something right away, most of this forest and valley will be gone in eight years.” He spread his hands. “The Honduran government is committed to protecting this area, but doesn’t have the money. We urgently need international support.”

The expedition was made possible with the permission, partnership, and support of the government of Honduras; Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández Avarado; Virgilio Paredes Trapero, director of the Honduran Institute for Anthropology and History (IHAH); Oscar Neil Cruz, Chief of the Archaeology Division of IHAH, as well as Minister of Defense Samuel Reyes and the Armed Forces of Honduras under the command of Gen. Fredy Santiago Díaz Zelaya, with Gen. Carlos Roberto Puerto and Lt. Col. Willy Joel  Oseguera, and the soldiers of TESON, Honduran Special Forces.

Douglas Preston writes about archaeology for the New Yorker and other publications. His account of Coronado’s search for the Seven Cities of Gold was recently issued as an e-book.

Médicos pesquisam influência do ‘passe’ espírita para tratar a ansiedade (G1)

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14/03/2015 08h00 – Atualizado em 14/03/2015 08h00

Pesquisa da Unesp estuda união entre tratamento espiritual e médico. Trabalho é realizado por médicos da Associação Espírita de Botucatu (SP).

Do G1 Bauru e Marília

Passe simples sendo aplicado pelo grupo mediúnico (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Passe simples sendo aplicado pelo grupo mediúnico (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Um grupo de oito médicos da Associação Espírita de Médicos de Botucatu (SP) se reuniu para pesquisar a influência da terapêutica energética do “passe” espírita na redução da ansiedade. A técnica, originada das práticas de cura do cristianismo primitivo, consiste basicamente na imposição de mãos sobre uma pessoa, a fim de transferir boas energias e tratar o lado espiritual de quem recebe o “passe”.

A pesquisa teve início em 2014 e está em fase de desenvolvimento na Faculdade de Medicina de Botucatu/Unesp (FMB). De acordo com o médico infectologista Ricardo de Souza Cavalcante, a inspiração para a pesquisa surgiu de outro grupo de médicos, de São Paulo, que iniciou um estudo sobre a eficácia de uma técnica semelhante, o Reiki, de origem japonesa.

Passistas preparados para receber grupo de pessoas para o passe conjugado (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Passistas preparados iniciar sessão do passe conjugado (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

O estudo sobre o “passe” é feito com voluntários, não necessariamente espíritas ou praticantes de alguma religião, que não estejam fazendo nenhum tipo de tratamento psicológico ou psiquiátrico. “Primeiramente, nós fazemos uma avaliação médica para verificar se o voluntário tem realmente o diagnóstico de ansiedade. Se confirmado, o paciente passa a frequentar a sala de estudos uma vez por semana, durante oito semanas, para receber o ‘passe’ ”, explica Ricardo.

Ainda de acordo com o médico, antes de iniciar o tratamento, os participantes passam por um tempo de meditação e concentração. Música ambiente é utilizada para relaxar e, por 5 minutos, um terapeuta impõe as mãos sobre a cabeça, tórax e barriga do voluntário. São levados em conta, na análise, níveis de depressão, qualidade de vida e grau de espiritualidade do paciente.

Os voluntários respondem a um questionário ao final de cada sessão e, alguns deles, passam por exames de eletroencefalograma, para medir as variações das ondas cerebrais antes, durante e depois do procedimento.

Passe conjugado, com dois ou mais passistas (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Passe conjugado, com dois ou mais passistas (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Ciência e espiritualidade
Nas últimas décadas, muitos estudos científicos têm sido feitos a fim de demonstrar os benefícios de aliar o trabalho com a espiritualidade ao tratamento médico convencional.

“Houve uma separação histórica, mas eu acredito que essas coisas precisam caminhar juntas. O ser humano deve ser visto como um todo. Nós não somos só um amontoado de células. Temos, comprovadamente, um lado emocional, espiritual”, pontua Ricardo.

A dona de casa Silvia Helena Vieira da Silva, de 47 anos, é uma das voluntárias que participarão da pesquisa. Católica, ela acredita que as práticas espíritas podem colaborar para o bem-estar. “Nós estamos tão ansiosos, nos medicando tanto, que eu gostaria de experimentar algo que não fosse medicamento, até porque remédios atacam meu organismo. Se eu puder fugir, eu fujo”, declara Silvia, que sofre as consequências físicas da ansiedade.

“Nós que temos filhos, estamos sempre na expectativa de algo. É um convívio constante com a ansiedade. Quando ela aparece, meu intestino solta, sinto dores no estômago e na cabeça. Quero muito que esta iniciativa dê certo”, conta.

“Muitos voluntários estão participando da pesquisa. Eles precisaram demonstrar ter ansiedade e não esteja em tratamento psicológico pode participar. Nosso objetivo não é converter ninguém”, explica o médico.

Os interessados em participar da pesquisa podem obter informações pelo telefone (14) 3811- 6547.

Leopoldo, diretor de comunicação do Centro Espírita Amor e Caridade (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Leopoldo Zanardi, diretor de comunicação do Centro Espírita Amor e Caridade (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Passe na Dourtina Espírita
De acordo com Leopoldo Zanardi, diretor de comunicação do Centro Espírita Amor e Caridade, de Bauru (SP), o “passe” trata-se de uma assistência espiritual, denominada de fluidoterapia, e que não anula a necessidade do tratamento médico. Este nome é dado por ser uma transferência de energias. “As mãos são colocadas de 10 a 15 centímetros acima da cabeça, não há toque físico. A Federação Espírita brasileira aconselha que as mãos sejam colocadas apenas sobre a cabeça”, conta Leopoldo.

Ele explica também que, na doutrina espírita, acredita-se que além das boas energias passadas pelo passista, existe também a atuação de espíritos que identificam e agem diretamente no problema de quem está recebendo o passe, seja ele físico, emocional ou espiritual. O procedimento pode ser individual (“passe simples”) ou em grupo (“passe conjugado” – 2 ou mais passistas realizam o procedimento). Mas quanto mais pessoas estiverem juntas, melhor, de acordo com Leopoldo.

Prece feita pelo grupo mediúnico antes de dar início ao procedimento (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Prece feita pelo grupo mediúnico antes de dar início ao procedimento (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

No Centro Espírita, o passe simples pode ser tomado por qualquer um que desejar, sem a necessidade de entrevista. Mas, para aqueles que querem tratar algo específico, é necessário passar pelo atendimento, onde será identificada a necessidade de cada pessoa.

Em seguida a pessoa recebe um papel que dá direito a oito passes, que devem ser tomados uma vez por semana. Em ambos os casos, os pacientes entram em uma sala, após um período de oração do grupo mediúnico (responsável por aplicar os passes), sentam-se nas cadeiras e estendem as duas mãos para frente, como quem está para receber algo.

Os passistas, como também são chamados os membros do grupo mediúnico, impõe as mãos sobre a cabeça das pessoas, uma nova prece é anunciada e, após poucos minutos de silêncio, tudo está feito. Depois de dispensar as pessoas, os passistas fazem outra oração de agradecimento e encerram o procedimento. “É importante ressaltar que não se deve abrir mão do tratamento médico. Nós oferecemos uma assistência espiritual. Também não basta apenas ‘tomar o passe’. É necessário assistir às palestras, mudar o pensamento, buscar ser melhor a cada dia. Dominar as más inclinações e fazer caridade. Precisamos estar em constante evolução”, completa Leopoldo.

Iole Angelo Cintra fala de sua experiência com o 'passe' (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Iole Angelo Cintra fala de sua experiência com o passe espírita (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Para a dona de casa Iole Angelo Cintra, de 46 anos, tomar os “passes” trouxe melhora para problemas de insônia e dor de cabeça que, segundo ela, tinham raiz espiritual.

“Eu não dormia direito à noite. Aqui no centro descobri que eu tinha ‘desdobramento’, que é uma espécie de mediunidade que me faz sair do meu corpo. Eu me via dormindo à noite e andava pela minha casa. Quando comecei a tomar os passes, as dores de cabeça sumiram e eu pude controlar mais esse desdobramento. O efeito do passe é ótimo, mas também depende da pessoa se esforçar para ser alguém melhor”, contou Iole.

Aplicação do passe simples pelo grupo mediúnico (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Aplicação do passe simples pelo grupo mediúnico (Foto: Isabela Ribeiro/ G1)

Losing our Fear! Facing the Anthro-Obscene (Entitle Blog)

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entitlefellows
October 20, 2014

by Erik Swyngedouw**

It’s useless to wait-for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilisation. It is within this reality that we must choose sides.

The Invisible Committee

The hegemonic liberal frame that sutures the environmental literary landscape today is ‘market environmentalism’. Greening the market economy, so the fantasy goes, is systematically advanced across the academic and popular media landscape as the panacea for the environmental deadlock we are in. The dominant argumentation of ‘green economy’ pundits maintains that merely greening the existing socio-economic relations will bring a sustainable solution. Ecologising the economy would be necessary and sufficient to evade a pending ecological Armageddon while permitting the untroubled continuation of civilisation as we know it for a while longer.

It is precisely the premise of this biblical promise of an ecological catastrophe coming near you in the near future that should be rejected completely. Confronted with cataclysmic images of imminent ecological disaster, which predominate the ecological and climate discourse and imaginary, and whose ultimate goal is precisely to make sure that the disaster does not take place (if we take the right measures), the only correct radical answer seems to be ‘don’t worry’ (Al Gore, Prince Charles, green boys and girls, eco-responsible companies, environmental civil servants), your disaster scenario is factually correct, but just a bit out-of-synch; social-ecological Armageddon will not only take place, it is already taking place, it has already happened. Many already live in the apocalypse, in those places where the intertwining of environmental change and social conditions has already reduced living conditions to ‘bare life’. Socio-ecological entanglements have already reached the ‘point of no return’. It is already too late to do something about nature. It has always already been too late. It is precisely by accepting this reality that a new politics can emerge.

Source: Robyn Woolston

‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ has become an often-heard slogan to inform us that a new geological era has started, that it is already too late to save Nature. Whereas until recently earthly processes only proceeded very slowly and irrespective of human interventions at the earth’s surface or in the atmosphere, human beings have now become co-producers of a deep geological time itself. Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize winning chemist, invented the term about ten years ago to refer to what comes after the Holocene, the relatively moderate geo-climatic period in which agriculture, cities and complex human civilisations came into being. The notion of the Anthropocene suggests that the intertwining of social and ‘natural’ processes is now so intense that Nature as the merely external condition of existence for human beings has come to an end. There is no longer a form of Nature that is not influenced by social, cultural, and economic relations. Henrik Ernstson, eminent political ecologist, recently proffered the term ‘Anthro-Obscene’ to signal the starkly de-politicising and plainly disempowering mobilisation of what nonetheless sounds like a revolutionary concept. Is the ‘Anthropocene’ and its intense human – non-human entanglements not precisely the name for the disavowed historical unfolding of the capitalist political ecology of the past few centuries? Has it not been the historical-geographical dynamic of capitalism and its global spread that has banned the very existence of an external nature?

The Anthropocene heralds the period since the beginning of industrialisation, and therefore capitalism, which brought a qualitative change in the geo-eco-climatic dynamic on earth as a result of the ever intensifying interaction between human beings and their physical conditions of existence. The Anthropocene is therefore nothing else than a geological name for capitalism WITH nature. Ocean acidification, changes in biodiversity, genetic migration and new genetic combinations, climate change, large infrastructures which influence the geodetic dynamic, new materials, global and often unexpected new disease carriers and so on and so forth resulted in ever more complex entanglements of ‘natural’ and ‘social’ processes whereby human beings became active agents in the co-production of the earth’s future history. The Anthropocene is just another name to indicate the End or the Death of Nature. This cannot be undone, however hard we try. Time is irreversible. There is no ideal, lost place, time or ecology, no Arcadia to which we can return. Eden has never existed anyway. The past is foreclosed forever, but the future – now including the future of a thoroughly socialised nature – is radically open. It is within this historically and geographically specific configuration that not only the possibility, but also the necessity for a real politicisation of the environment arises, that choices have to be made and different socio-ecological entanglements have to be experimented with and produced.

The Anthropocene in its Anthro-Obscenic reality displaces the terrain of the political as merely inter-human activity to the environment as a whole, including those processes, which recently were left to (the laws of) nature. Non-human actants and processes are now engaged in a process of politicisation. And this should be recognised fully in its radical materiality. The Anthro-Obscene opens a perspective whereby different nature-realities and social-ecological interactions can be imagined and realised. The political struggle about the nature, direction and development of these interactions and about the process of egalitarian social-ecological co-production of the commons of life is what a progressive politicisation of the environment envisages. Yes, the apocalypse is already here, but that is not a reason for despair or panic. Let us fully recognise the emancipatory possibilities of apocalyptic life!

The ‘green economy’. Source: Nation of Change

Many people would concur with the view that the climate crisis will fundamentally not be solved by hegemonic approaches of the ‘green economy’, by making capital compatible with – if not cashing in on – ecology; they note that energy costs are on the rise, social inequalities increase, rigid nationalisms – if not worse – emerge everywhere, and that the marketisation of everything is being paid for at an extravagant ecological and social cost. Many people know that things can and should be different. However, like me, they do not know what to do or how to get to something not only different, but better. We all share this gnawing and uncanny feeling that hopeless attempts by economic and political elites to translate the ecological and social catastrophe which surrounds us into a ecological and social crisisthat can and needs to be managed does not solve the problems but push them into the future or to other places. Indeed, does the dominant rhetoric of the elite not maintain that ‘the situation is serious but not catastrophic’? Is their neoliberal recipe book proffered as guarantee that the disaster will not occur? Don’t they claim that the crisis can be overcome with a bit of goodwill and effort: social unity will be restored, economic growth will recover and ecological problems will be addressed sustainably? ‘Hold on for a while’, they seem to be saying, ‘rescue is on its way!’

Don’t you have the surreptitious feeling that something is wrong about this rhetoric of those who (sometimes literally) want to conserve the existing situation at all cost; that the ecological and social crisis cannot be made manageable with the help of mere technical and organisational adaptations; that the attempts of the elite to reduce the catastrophe to a crisis which only requires ‘good’, ‘participatory’ and ‘ecological’ management only enlarges the anxiety, increases insecurity, and especially, worsens the catastrophe which many already experience?

What would happen if we threw off the fear? If we resolutely accepted that the ecological, social and economic apocalypse is already here, that we live in the Anthro-Obscene, that it no longer needs to be announced as a dystopian promise for an avoidable future (if only the right measures are taken today)? What if we really would believe that things can not only change, but have to? That it really is already too late for many people and ecologies?

Yes but, you might think. After all, there is no catastrophe, we don’t live in the Apocalypse. It was a good wine year, the summer was a bit disappointing but the holidays were sunny, the financial crisis is being addressed without too much pain for me and my siblings, my education proceeds as planned, sustainable environmental technologies are stimulated, the hybrid car really drives smoothly, waste is being reduced, and the new IKEA catalogue promises sustainable entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the green parties are not doing badly in the polls. You’re right. The catastrophe is not for most of you or for me. Crisis, yes, but talking about catastrophe appears a bit overdone.

But perhaps we should not forget the words of the Italian Marxist Amadeo Bordiga: ‘when the ship goes down, so too do the first class passengers’. There is no salvation island where the elites can retreat into splendid isolation (despite their best efforts to do so) he claimed. This slogan is often adopted by ecologists of a variety of stripes or colours. We are all in the same boat. Bill Gates, Al Gore, Jeffrey, Richard Branson, the inhabitants of sinking islands, my son, and even Prince Charles today share the opinion of this notorious communist of the common threat facing the commons. But on closer inspection – I would argue — good old Amadeo was desperately wrong. See the blockbuster movie Titanic once again. A large share of the upper class passengers found a lifeboat; the others remained stuck in the underbelly of the beast. The social and ecological catastrophe is indeed not here for everyone; the apocalypse is uneven. And this is where the ultimate truth of our current predicament is situated. Remember the images of the earthquake in Haiti a few years ago, or the devastation wrought by hurricane Katrina in New Orleans: hundreds of thousands of homeless people, hundreds of deaths, dysentery and malaria spreading fast, exaggerated reports about thieves who stole paltry possessions to stay alive, shortages of drinking water. The earthquake was not the consequence of human interventions in nature, the hurricane perhaps. But what we know very well is that the socio-ecological catastrophe is not caused by the earthquake or the hurricane. It was there long before disaster struck. Nature was not responsible for the post-apocalyptic post-human landscape after the quake. Most Haitians, together with all the others who balance on the verge of survival, have always already lived in the apocalypse, before, during and after the quake. Racial prejudices, dire living conditions and a precarious socio-ecological existence were also the lot of the poor in New Orleans. Or think about the incalculable number of environmental refugees.

Source: FightBack

We have a rough idea about the number that is reaching European shores via the Mediterranean, but we have not a clue about the countless migrants, except through occasional harrowing stories of sunken boats, that fail to make it to the continent, and become fish fodder. It is precisely the combination of ecological, social and economic relations, which pushes them, often with desperately little means, to leave their home countries. They, too, fled a catastrophe. Our apocalyptic times are perversely uneven, whereby the survival pods of the elites are fed and sustained by the disintegration of life-worlds elsewhere.

Consider, for example, how the socio-ecological conditions in Chinese mega-factories, like Foxconn, where our iPhone, iPod, iPad and other gadgets, so indispensable for ‘normal’ life are assembled, make 19th century European cities look like socio-ecological utopias. The social and ecological catastrophe which international elites imposed upon Greece to make sure the European neoliberal model could be sustained a while longer shows that the collapse of daily life is reserved for certain people, so that the others can go on with business as usual. If nuclear power plants close down tomorrow, the lights will continue burning on Putin’s gas. Despite Pussy Riot. And tar sands exploitation or ‘fracking’ will protect us from the disaster of ‘peak oil’ while further pumping up greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere never before found in the earth’s history.

‘Natural’ and ecological disasters show in all their sharpness what we have already known for a long time, namely, the politically powerless and economically weak are paying the price, they always do. The apocalypse is always theirs, and only theirs. While the biblical apocalypse of Saint John announced the final judgment which offered paradise to the chosen few and damned the evil ones, the socio-ecological apocalypse separates the elite from the powerless and excluded.

Perhaps something must be done about the lifeboats. For some, the solution is to seal them off hermetically, to protect them with electric fences and impenetrable walls, to strengthen militarised forces to secure the perimeter of their own little eco-paradise. The zombies of the apocalypse, the hordes at the gates, the motley crew that demands its share of nature, the rebels who ask a new order: they represent the reality of catastrophe today. And this reality should be taken seriously. We all share in it. Eco-warrior, advocate of nuclear energy, incorrigible Malthusian and inventor of the Gaia hypothesis James Lovelock summarised the possible consequences of the uneven apocalypse very eloquently and soberly:

“… what if at some time in the next few years we realise, as we did in 1939, that democracy had temporarily to be suspended and we had to accept a disciplined regime that saw the UK as a legitimate but limited safe haven for civilisation. Orderly survival requires an unusual degree of human understanding and leadership and may require, as in war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency.”

The emergency situation evoked by Lovelock is not there to make sure everyone survives. It is supposed to be the consequence of the demographic explosion cum ecological disintegration of the Global South as a result of which hordes of eco-zombies will crowd at the gates of the egalitarian social-ecological paradise at the other side of the Channel. An autocratic leadership and the suspension of democracy are precisely needed to keep the gates firmly shut. This might appear a somewhat exaggerated perspective. But is this not exactly what happened over the past few years? Perhaps not so much with regard to climate change (very little has happened on that terrain), but surely with regard to attempts to reduce the economic-financial catastrophe to a manageable crisis. All other problems were shoved aside. Draconian austerity measures were imposed which especially affected the weakest, massive public means were and are mobilised to keep financial institutions afloat, migration is being managed with all possible repressive means. Despite profound and previously unseen protest, only one set of recipes was applied to restore the existing financial-economic order. The elite indeed will, if necessary, use all means available to maintain its status and position.

But does in the generalised forms of resistance reside not only the hope, but the absolute certainty, that change is possible and needed? A change that revolves around the signifiers of democracy, solidarity and the egalitarian management of the commons? Does this not suggest, rather provocatively, that the political project that combines those terms might carry the name ‘communism’; ‘a communism of the commons’. This suggestion breaks so strongly with the currently hegemonic logic and recipes that many will sceptically respond: how can the democratic management of the commons ever be realised? How can the egalitarian and collective management of the commons be organised in the current neoliberal climate which includes the privatisation of nature, the individualisation of daily life, and the fragmentation of the political and ideological landscape? Of course, the critique of the hegemonic project of the green economy is valid, and another approach is necessary, but should we – faced with the coming catastrophes – not rather opt for practical solutions, which maybe do not really question the status quo, but are at least a bit more realistic, less weighted down by history, and feasible today?

Furthermore, the term ‘communism’ probably – and rightly – evokes the horror of the 20th century (the Stalinist terror, the ecological disaster, the social inequality), or at least, the term refers to a radical failure of what was once presented as a utopian solution for society’s ills. Perhaps ‘communism’ is indeed not a good name to refer to a democratic ecological project of the commons. Perhaps we should let fear triumph here too. Or maybe it is better to reserve the term socialism or communism for the elitist and undemocratic mobilisation of the commons for personal gain and the reinforcement of the elite’s power position.

We are all socialists now. Source: Newsweek

In February 2009, Newsweek, not immediately the most radical magazine, stated on its cover “We are all socialists now”. The title evidently referred to the 1.5 trillion dollars of public money that President Barack Obama pumped into the banking system to save Wall Street and to prevent a (foretold apocalyptic) planetary financial meltdown. Shortly afterwards, other countries, including the European Union would follow suit. Trillions of euros, part of the common capital, of our commons, were mobilised to provide the sputtering profit motor with new oil. Is there a better example to show that socialism is a real possibility, that collective means, the commons, can massively and collectively be used to reach a particular social goal, in this case the maintenance of elite positions, the avoidance of the apocalypse for the elite on the back of the weakest? Despite the Spanish Indignados, the Greek outraged, and many Occupy! movements which demand ‘Real Democracy Now’, the assembled elites continue undisturbed, realising their collective phantasmagorical utopia. Indeed, we are living in properly socialist times, a socialism of the elites.

We are NOT all socialists now…..Source: Serr8d.blogspot.se

Is a better example possible that the commons can indeed be used collectively (in this case the collective of the 1% – still a significant number)? That a communism of the elites is precisely the political name for the current neoliberal practice? Putin’s Russia is a good example of the appropriation of the commons by an oligarchic ultra-minority. As Marx stated long ago, history unfolds as a drama (the real socialism of the 20th century) and repeats itself as a farce (the real socialism of the elites today). What the socialist movement of the 20th century mostly failed to realise (the nationalisation of the banks) is being achieved by the elite in a very short lapse of time, in the name of the recovery of and sustainability of capitalism! It appears indeed that the collective management of the commons as such is not the problem. It is certainly not a naive or utopian proposal. The question is rather one of its management by whom and for whom?

Where resides the problem then? What is it that we don’t dare to face? What withholds us from tackling the unequal social-ecological apocalypse? The answer is implicit in what precedes. Not the collective management of the commons, of the environment, is the problem, but rather the undemocratic character of the current type of management. This does not relate to the shortcomings of the institutional and electoral machines of daily policy-making (parliaments, regular elections, public administration, political parties, etcetera  – very few still believe in its potential to nurture democratizing and egalitarian change), but to the basis of a democratic society itself. The foundation of democracy is that everyone is supposed to be equal. Democratic equality is not a sociologically verifiable given – we all know that each concrete society knows many clearly observable inequalities – but an axiomatic principle. The democratic is precisely the axiomatic acceptance of the equality of everyone and the recognition of the egalitarian capacity to govern in a concrete context, which is always marked by social and ecological inequalities.  That is the truth which is put forward time and again by resistance movements, Indignados, the Arab Spring, the women’s, workers’ and environmental movements. That is why the truth of democracy is not a universal standard. Its universal truth (we are all equal in principle) is carried by the particular group who is wronged as its equality is mis- or unrecognised. That is why we can conclusively state that Al Gore, Richard Branson, the president of the European Central bank, or Angela Merkel are undemocratic, while environmental refugees, climate justice activists, resistance movements against the privatisation of the commons and Occupy! activists, through their political action, reveal the scandal of institutionalised democracy and the necessity of an egalitarian communist restructuration of political, social and ecological relations, although they too are a sociological minority. In this sense, they precisely indicate what really matters in these apocalyptic times. Let’s join them. Translating the egalitarian demand in concrete social-ecological equality is the stake of a real politicisation of the environment. And this requires intellectual courage, social mobilisation, and new forms of political action and organisation. We have nothing to lose but our fear.

* I have taken the term ‘Anthro-Obscene’ from Henrik Ernstson, eminent political ecologists of the Universities of Stockholm, Stanford, and Cape Town, who suggested it as part of the theme for an upcoming workshop on politicizing urban political ecology that we are organising in 2015. This blog is a redacted reflection of a foreword for a fantastic book coming out in 2015: Kennis A. and Lievens M. The Myth of the Green Economy. (London and New York: Routledge).

** Erik Swyngedouw Erik is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester in its School of Environment and Development. He received his PhD entitled “The production of new spaces of production” under the supervision of David Harvey at Johns Hopkins University (1991). From 1988 until 2006 he taught at the University of Oxford and was a Fellow of St. Peter’s College. He moved to the University of Manchester in 2006. Erik has published several books and research papers in the fields of political economy, political ecology, and urban theory and culture. He aims at bringing politically explicit yet theoretically and empirically grounded research that contributes to the practice of constructing a more genuinely humanising geography.

‘Não somos ratos de laboratório’, diz diretor da Sangamo Biosciences (O Globo)

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Aparelho para sequenciamento genético. Para Lanphier, pesquisas com células-tronco não-reprodutivas são as únicas aceitáveis – David Paul Morris BLOOMBERG

Edward Lanphier comanda entidade ligada à medicina regenerativa e pede um freio nas pesquisas de manipulação do DNA com células reprodutivas

POR FABIO TEIXEIRA

17/03/2015 6:00 / ATUALIZADO 17/03/2015 8:15

RIO – Edward Lanphier comanda a Sangamo Biosciences, uma das entidades que formam a Aliança para a Medicina Regenerativa (ARM, na sigla em inglês), organização que reúne mais de 200 empresas no mundo da área de biotecnologia e instituições de pesquisa. A Aliança pediu uma moratória de prazo indefinido para pesquisas e prática de manipulação do DNA de células reprodutivas.

O debate sobre o tema, que já dura anos, esquentou com o desenvolvimento de técnicas que permitem que a edição de genes ocorra na prática, o que abre a possibilidade de gerar bebês sob medida.

Lanphier anunciou o pedido de interrupção nas pesquisas em um documento assinado por ele e outros membros da aliança. O texto, publicado na “Nature”, revista científica de renome internacional, declara que este tipo de pesquisa não deve ser levada adiante.

Edward Lanphier, diretor-presidente da Sangamo Biosciences – Divulgação

Enquanto nos Estados Unidos e em países europeus ainda não há uma definição prática sobre se é permitida ou não a manipulação genética de células reprodutivas, no Brasil, estudos deste tipo já foram proibidos. A resolução foi publicada em 2004 pela Comissão Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa (Conep), órgão do Ministério da Saúde. Ela diz: “As pesquisas com intervenção para modificação do genoma humano só poderão ser realizadas em células somáticas (não-reprodutivas).” Agora a questão seria o uso ilícito de técnicas desenvolvidas no exterior.

Em entrevista publicada esta segunda-feira na revista digital O GLOBO a Mais, Lanphier explica por que considera que até mesmo a pesquisa básica deve ser banida.

A moratória é geral?

Sim. O pedido de moratória é para que tenhamos um tempo para que todas as partes discutam o assunto. É um pedido. Mas a premissa da qual partimos é que mesmo com essa discussão existe uma linha que não pode ser ultrapassada.

Qual é o principal risco de editar o genoma de células reprodutivas (espermatozoides e óvulos)?

O grande problema é ético, apesar de haver também riscos de segurança e técnicos, que limitam o uso prático. A questão ética ultrapassa a barreira da legislação e políticas de cada país. Ela é fundamental.

Se é possível alterar o genoma, é possível escolher a cor do cabelo, dos olhos ou até da pele de um bebê?

Vai além disso. O problema é não só poder alterar as características de um indivíduo, mas também de todas as futuras gerações. Não somos ratos de laboratório, muito menos algo como um milho transgênico. Como espécie, nós humanos decidimos que somos únicos. Por décadas, os países desenvolvidos debateram a modificação de genes em células reprodutivas e se posicionaram contra isso.

É possível alterar genes que ditam características como inteligência ou até comportamento?

Essa é a nossa preocupação. Pois o indivíduo alterado passará as mudanças para as gerações futuras. Aberta a oportunidade deste tipo de pesquisa, ela pode ser usada para objetivos que não têm valor terapêutico, de tratamento de doenças. É um caminho sem volta. Nós, como sociedade, precisamos pensar no que nos torna humanos. No passado já nos posicionamos contra ações deste tipo, que podem nos levar a uma sociedade pautada pela eugenia.

O senhor poderia explicar a diferença entre a manipulação de células somáticas (não-reprodutivas) e a de óvulos e espermatozoides?

Existe uma diferença fundamental. É preto e branco. Na manipulação de células somáticas, você busca alterar um gene para criar uma resistência no indivíduo contra uma doença específica. Você não altera os genes de futuras gerações, caso a pessoa tenha filhos. A única coisa que se tenta fazer é curar doenças. Existe, porém, uma linha que não deve ser ultrapassada. E ela é alterar óvulos e espermatozoides, pois eles conferem hereditariedade para as características manipuladas.

Se o senhor muda uma única característica e ela é passada para gerações futuras, não é possível que outras mutações inesperadas aconteçam?

Isso é perfeitamente possível. É uma das questões que levantamos. Atualmente a natureza disto e suas possíveis consequências são completamente desconhecidas. Há muitas questões sem respostas. Precisamos responder a todas antes de sequer considerar a questão maior, que é a ética do processo. Ainda é muito cedo. Por isso, pedimos uma moratória.

Quais limites o senhor sente que é necessário criar a longo prazo?

Propusemos a moratória justamente para discutir o assunto. Não existe justificativa para realizar alterações genéticas em células reprodutivas.

O senhor cita uma possibilidade de rejeição da sociedade contra este tipo de pesquisa. O temor é de que isso atinja também a pesquisa com as demais células?

Seria uma rejeição motivada por falta de conhecimento.

Que linhas de estudo são consideradas promissoras?

As doenças com mais chances de serem curadas por este tipo de pesquisa são aquelas que têm um gene específico associado. É o caso de hemofilia, anemia falciforme e vários tipos de câncer. Essas são as oportunidades mais imediatas que se abrem com a pesquisa. Tecnicamente e teoricamente é possível ainda usar a tecnologia para alterar mais de um gene, para curar doenças relacionadas a múltiplos genes.

Há algum argumento a favor da alteração de genes em óvulos e espermatozoides?

Não. Mesmo em situações onde pais tenham genes com falhas ligadas a doenças hereditárias, não se justifica. Há exames pré-natais e tratamentos de fertilização in vitro para contornar estes problemas. Não há justificativa para editar o genoma humano em células reprodutivas.

Se é possível alterar o genoma humano, não é necessário questionar o que nos torna humanos? Não estaríamos criando uma nova espécie?

A grande questão é que, se mudarmos o DNA, mudamos a espécie.

Por que você foi às ruas? (TV Folha e BBC)

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Em ato contra governo, manifestantes divergem sobre impeachment (TV Folha)

16/03/2015 – TV Folha – Multimídia – Folha de S.Paulo

Vídeo

As manifestações de rua realizadas neste domingo (15) contra o governo da presidente Dilma Rousseff e o PT alcançaram todos os Estados do país, com protestos reunindo milhares de pessoas mesmo em redutos petistas.

O maior ato ocorreu em São Paulo, onde 210 mil pessoas passaram pela avenida Paulista ao longo do dia, segundo o Datafolha, apesar da chuva intermitente.

Nas ruas, apesar do discurso ser contrário ao governo de Dilma Rousseff, os manifestantes divergiam sobre o impeachment da presidente, como mostra o vídeo acima.

A Polícia Militar calculou em 1 milhão o número de participantes, com base em fotografias aéreas, segundo nota da corporação.

Se considerado o número do Datafolha, os protestos reuniram ao menos 877 mil pessoas em todo o Brasil. Pela estimativa da PM paulista, o total sobe para 1,7 milhão.

Editoria de Arte/Folhapress

*   *   *

Por que você foi às ruas? (BBC)

Atualizado pela última vez 05:29 (Brasília) 08:29 GMT

Vídeo

A BBC Brasil conversou com pessoas que foram às ruas de São Paulo – palco das maiores manifestações do país nos últimos dias – para saber o que as levou às ruas contra e a favor do governo de Dilma Rousseff.

Na sexta-feira, 13 de março, sindicatos, movimentos estudantis e sociais levaram milhares de pessoas à Avenida Paulista em uma manifestação que fez críticas ao governo, mas ofereceu apoio à presidente.

Muitos dos manifestantes falavam em evitar “uma tentativa de golpe”, referindo-se aos pedidos de impeachment, que outro grupo levou às ruas, com centenas de milhares de vozes, no domingo.

O protesto contra a presidente petista no dia 15 de março reuniu discursos diferentes a respeito dos problemas e das soluções possíveis para o sistema político brasileiro – alguns falavam em reforma política, outros chegavam a pedir uma intervenção militar.

On pi day, how scientists use this number (Science Daily)

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Date: March 12, 2015

Source: NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Summary: If you like numbers, you will love March 14, 2015. When written as a numerical date, it’s 3/14/15, corresponding to the first five digits of pi (3.1415) — a once-in-a-century coincidence! Pi Day, which would have been the 136th birthday of Albert Einstein, is a great excuse to eat pie, and to appreciate how important the number pi is to math and science.

Take JPL Education’s Pi Day challenge featuring real-world questions about NASA spacecraft — then tweet your answers to @NASAJPL_Edu using the hashtag #PiDay. Answers will be revealed on March 16. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

If you like numbers, you will love March 14, 2015. When written as a numerical date, it’s 3/14/15, corresponding to the first five digits of pi (3.1415) — a once-in-a-century coincidence! Pi Day, which would have been the 136th birthday of Albert Einstein, is a great excuse to eat pie, and to appreciate how important the number pi is to math and science.

Pi is the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle. Any time you want to find out the distance around a circle when you have the distance across it, you will need this formula.

Despite its frequent appearance in math and science, you can’t write pi as a simple fraction or calculate it by dividing two integers (…3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3…). For this reason, pi is said to be “irrational.” Pi’s digits extend infinitely and without any pattern, adding to its intrigue and mystery.

Pi is useful for all kinds of calculations involving the volume and surface area of spheres, as well as for determining the rotations of circular objects such as wheels. That’s why pi is important for scientists who work with planetary bodies and the spacecraft that visit them.

At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, pi makes a frequent appearance. It’s a staple for Marc Rayman, chief engineer and mission director for NASA’s Dawn spacecraft. Dawn went into orbit around dwarf planet Ceres on March 6. Rayman uses a formula involving pi to calculate the length of time it takes the spacecraft to orbit Ceres at any given altitude. You can also use pi to think about Earth’s rotation.

“On Pi Day, I will think about the nature of a day, as Earth’s rotation on its axis carries me on a circle 21,000 miles (34,000 kilometers) in circumference, which I calculated using pi and my latitude,” Rayman said.

Steve Vance, a planetary chemist and astrobiologist at JPL, also frequently uses pi. Lately, he has been using pi in his calculations of how much hydrogen might be available for chemical processes, and possibly biology, in the ocean beneath the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa.

“To calculate the hydrogen produced in a given unit area, we divide by Europa’s surface area, which is the area of a sphere with a radius of 970 miles (1,561 kilometers),” Vance said.

Luisa Rebull, a research scientist at NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, also considers pi to be important in astronomy. When calculating the distance between stars in a projection of the sky, scientists use a special kind of geometry called spherical trigonometry. That’s an extension of the geometry you probably learned in middle school, but it takes place on a sphere rather than a flat plane.

“In order to do these calculations, we need to use formulae, the derivation of which uses pi,” she said. “So, this is pi in the sky!”

Make sure to note when the date and time spell out the first 10 digits of pi: 3.141592653. On 3/14/15 at 9:26:53 a.m., it is literally the most perfectly “pi” time of the century — so grab a slice of your favorite pie, and celebrate math!

For more fun with pi, check out JPL Education’s second annual Pi Day challenge, featuring real-world NASA math problems. NASA/JPL education specialists, with input from scientists and engineers, have crafted questions involving pi aimed at students in grades 4 through 11, but open to everyone. Take a crack at them at:

http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/infographic.view.php?id=11257

Share your answers on Twitter by tweeting to @NASAJPL_Edu with the hashtag #PiDay. Answers will be revealed on March 16 (aka Pi + 2 Day!).

Resources for educators, including printable Pi Day challenge classroom handouts, are available at: www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/piday2015

Caltech manages JPL for NASA.